That's when the AA flight attendants formed their own union, the APFA, and tossed the TWU off the property.The reason that WN flight attendants are the highest paid is simply that Southwest has never been thru Ch 11 and has never whacked pay like everyone else. Additionally, WN was still quite small in September, 2001, and was in a position to grow dramatically in the following decade, and was thus able to add many new-hire FAs during that growth so that the top scale wasn't all that relevant. The legacies, on the other hand, did nothing but shrink as WN grew (and non-union B6 and VX were formed and grew at the legacies' expense). When you shrink, you go a decade without hiring new FAs, and more and more are at top of scale.Now that WN's growth rate has slowed, more and more employees are at or near top of scale, and WN is looking a lot more like a legacy airline. Expect more buyouts in future years to remove the highly paid FAs, fleet service and agents, which will preserve plenty of $$$ for pilots. There aren't enough young mechanics in the pipeline to even consider buyouts of old mechanics. The secret there is to keep the workforce small and highly paid, and continue plenty of outsourcing.