Gotta tag on here. As a 97 hire at age 29 would have finished number 180 at a stand alone UA. Anything close to relative seniority right now puts 800 younger CO pilots ahead of me. In this scenario, you go from spending your last 10 years as a WB Capt and your last 5 flying the biggest plane we fly to maybe not even being able to touch it.

This is the situation most 95-99 hires find themselves in. I hope there is a fair solution.

I didn't say what percentage either would end up. Just that depending on how longevity, career expectations, status etc.. are weighed for the SLI, a guy at x percentage could end up very close to a guy with y percentage. No one is going to end up at exactly the same percentage as where they were on their respective list.

95 to 99 seniority at LUAL and of course anybody hired after that have taken the brunt of the punishment over that last ten years. We are at the tip of the wagging seniority tail. It's basically been one good long series of punches to the mouth, one after another.

I think around 1200 former COEX pilots who now fly for CAL would strongly disagree.

Unfair to whom?

This being forum-land, please don't take my previous post to make less of the pain the furloughees have endured here. I was only illustrating to Motch that relative seniority today is not necessarily fair when you age the lists.

Didn't they all PFT in that period of time?

While I feel sorry for those at UAL who have been totally screwed by their parent company, what's done is done. This post is about some hard love and a reality check.

UAL shrank, and now that former size is just a number on a piece of paper that doesn't mean anything. It grew again when UAL and CAL merged. Actually, CAL shrank too, just not as much as UAL. The game of musical airline chairs is always being played, and the UAL pilot group lost a lot. This same game took a lot of other casualties with TWA, PAN AM, Eastern, and the list goes on...

UAL didn't care who it merged with back in 2010. It tried CAL back in 2008 and got rejected. In 2010, it decided to move on and court USAir. At that point CAL had a CEO who was put in place to make a deal and didn't like the result of a combined UAL/USAir to compete with. The rest is history.

The truth of the matter should be that if you are a CA when the merger happened, you should be a CA after the SLI. If you were a junior FO sitting reserve before the SLI, you should be the same after the SLI.

Some of the UAL guys (and we know UAL hired a lot between 98 and 2001) think they will be on par with CAL pilots hired during the same period. So basically, these UAL pilots think they should go from junior FO sitting reserve to sitting in a nice comfortable CA seat, hence the 90% to 65% comment. YGTBFKM.

Get real! Do you really think this is going to happen and this wouldn't be a windfall for UAL pilots? If UAL didn't merge, when a UAL pilot would eventually be recalled, do you think that they would jump straight from furlough to CA seat. Along the same lines, as a stand alone entity, when UAL furloughed, do you think at recall time, those junior FOs that were still on property would go from junior A319 FO to B757/767 CA? That is what a DOH type scenario or anything close to it would do.

CAL has slightly grown and had a ****load of retirements since 9/11. UAL has shrunk, twice. That shrinkage is no fault of anyone but the ineptitude of management at UAL and some strong industry pressure after 9/11.

Do some UAL pilots think an involuntary furlough at UAL that doesn't have a job right now at UAL, but for the past 3-4 years, they could go and apply at FDX, SWA, DL, and work there since they don't have a job should magically be placed above anyone that's currently working and has been working for 5-8 years with no furlough at CAL? How would that not be a windfall?

That brings up another question since the merger policy mentions equipment and status as being part of the equation.

What equipment does a furlough hold? Nothing. Null. Zero. It doesn't exist.

What status does a furlough hold? Unemployed unless they got hired somewhere else. As a matter of fact, some furloughed UAL pilots after 9/11 interviewed and got hired at CAL and are now CAs at L-CAL. Should a furloughed UAL pilot go in front of another furloughed UAL pilot that cut his losses and moved on with his life?

I'm sure we're all going to get screwed on this SLI. Personally, if we hadn't merged, I'd be looking at widebody FO real soon and CA a few years from now. I'm guessing that now I'll most likely have to wait a lot longer than that solely based on this merger. But that sure as heck shouldn't mean that I go from 90% to 95% and then stay at 95% for the next 5 years while UAL pilots decide whether or not to leave their job at USAir or China Air for the next 10 years.

I know my input means nothing, and our merger committees will duke it out then send it to arbitration. I'm just trying to show a little bit of sunlight to the BS that someone has been feeding some on the L-UAL side.

i am pretty sure whatever I think about how an SLI should be done will matter not. We can kick each other in the nuts over this on this forum, or just forget about it and let the arbitrator do it. Actually I HOPE an arbitrator does it because if we let our MEC's do it that means they made some huge carve outs for the members of the MEC's.

After it is done, I will decide what I want to do with my job at UAL. If I stay, I promise never to ***** about the outcome to a flying partner, or blame lCAL pilots for it.

If I believe that my outcome in the SLI doesn't make the job worth it, I won't stay, or in my case, come back from furlough.

Let the arbitrator do it and get on in life.

Two points:

1) The "virtual merger" with CAL did happen in 2008 and put into motion all of the pieces on the chess board that allowed the actual merger to happen (i.e. sail through DOT and DOJ review). This included systemwide code-sharing and the actual combination and/or coordination of certain departments long before the legal merger actually occurred. From a pilot perspective, UAL and CAL suddenly didn't compete on more than a handful of mainline routes as a result of the preparations...just ask a CAL or UAL commuter that suddenly lost mainline service to their base while the other company did the flying.

2) UAL was contractually required (per the Star agreement as a consequence of the failed 2000 merger attempt) to first have discussions with USAir before merging with anybody. It was theater, but UAL had to cross the "t's" and dot the "i's".

That is a straw man argument. I don't know of any UAL pilots that think they should suddenly go from F/O (or furloughed) and bump a CAL pilot out of the left seat.

What they are making a lot of noise about, however, is pay for longevity (i.e. match the current DAL contact) where the hourly pay rate is determined by DOH. This is a totally separate issue than longevity for SLI and would benefit pilots on both sides of the fence who experienced any time on furlough since 9/11.

Fair enough. I think we're all waiting for this SLI as the proverbial "other shoe to drop", so we can all get on with our lives.

I can't imagine the angst of the situation from USAir where that other shoe still hasn't dropped. It must be a real life living nightmare for both sides.