Pilot labor thread week 4/27-5/3

[AAA73Pilot]

Ridiculous. Let's see an A330 fly to China.

Holy Cow!! We agree on something!! But that is the plan as of 2 weeks ago. The brain trust in Tempe are planning just that. A330-200's to Beijing. Can you believe those hhhmmm People? I think ridiculous is too nice of a word to describe it.

 

[john john]

But to claim that in a merger with UA, USAirways would be the savior and in the driver's seat, and would insist on UA's pre-packaged bankruptcy goes beyond logic by any stretch of the imagination.

Sounds a little familiar doesn’t it do I need to give you a clue

 

[sharktooth]

Okay! I get it. But it is all semantics smarty. You get my point just as the other readers do.

Thanks for the compliment, but, really, I don't get your point. Why do you think that "you" bring an aircraft/position to a merger? What is it about you that guarantees such?

Item: I will defend to the end of days your pre-merger position. I just will not/cannot guarantee your pre-merger expectations. Sorry.

 

[fatherabraham]

Westy's,

I get the impression from these post of yours that you all think uaua pilots are generally on your side considering the nic situation.

Methinks when they (ual) stop and consider the leapfrogging that an AWA pilot would get with a nic integration over themselves (ual) the attitudes will change. Give it a little time.

FA

 

[LOA93]

Westy's,

I get the impression from these post of yours that you all think uaua pilots are generally on your side considering the nic situation.

Methinks when they (ual) stop and consider the leapfrogging that an AWA pilot would get with a nic integration over themselves (ual) the attitudes will change. Give it a little time.

FA

As opposed to a furloughed pilot leapfrogging with DOH.

 

[GorgeousGeorge]

As opposed to a furloughed pilot leapfrogging with DOH.

Really? DOH is DOH. There are east pilots based in PHX and LAS?

 

[nostradamus]

Notice united tried to dance with many airlines. When previous potential merger partners agreed on confidentiality and talked to united, they ran out of the meeting for the nearest fire exit. united airlines is in a desperate financial situation. They are arrogant enough to walk into a potential meeting about merger possibilities and offer the partner a pay off to screw their employees. Continental and Delta saw through this and ended the meeting promptly and kicked tiltons rear end out.


doug parker was the last choice, but they knew he will sell his soul.

All employees should fight this, usapa is a bump in the road compared to the alpa united pilots agenda and tiltons greed.

 

[NiceLandingCaptain]

Notice united tried to dance with many airlines. When previous potential merger partners agreed on confidentiality and talked to united, they ran out of the meeting for the nearest fire exit. united airlines is in a desperate financial situation. They are arrogant enough to walk into a potential meeting about merger possibilities and offer the partner a pay off to screw their employees. Continental and Delta saw through this and ended the meeting promptly and kicked tiltons rear end out.


doug parker was the last choice, but they knew he will sell his soul.

All employees should fight this, usapa is a bump in the road compared to the alpa united pilots agenda and tiltons greed.

Hey n-damus, what happened to all the rhetoric, cynicism, and "superiority complex?"

Its become pretty obvious your "home wrecking" usapian mistress is going to be nothing more than a rather short lived "experiment." One that's likely to blow up in your face, or at least whither on the vine.

I love watching all of this UAUA/LCC merger stuff. And I especially enjoy watching you and your fellow tyrants doing the squirmy looking "usapian belly dance" here on the publicly viewed USAMB.

Do you really think you can rally those 200 or so UPA folks to believe in usapa - especially when your entire basis for existence would place those folks at the bottom bottom of your DOH list? I got really scared when you said they're going to revive their web site........oooooohhh scary!!!

This is fun to watch - and my fellow 1800 westyz would pay good coin to watch this show. But guess what? Its all free!!

By the way, still enjoying that LOA 93 lifestyle? Dougie is too.......

NLC

 

[Low&away]

Since no pilot I have met ever had any input to the number and type of aircraft an airline had at merger time and, therefore, no pilot could ever be considered to have "brought" an aircraft to a merger, how would one determine what one brought? Perhaps you know something other than length of service or date of hire? and, no, charming wit does not count

Every once in a while I read a post on these boards that cuts to the chase. Are Pilots not, for hire employees? So why then do we engage in the fallacious arguments that accompany mergers. It seems that when a merger is in the works that the sole purpose of unionism takes a back seat for the accepted practice of leap frogging fellow pilots. Why does the totally false argument of aircraft ownership enter into merger discussion? Why do we allow arbitrary snapshots in time to bolster our overall scheme of creating the past present and future in such a way as to gain at the expense of others. I have an answer...greed. If I brought an A330 to a merger I doubt I would be flying it....

 

[LSS]

Notice united tried to dance with many airlines. When previous potential merger partners agreed on confidentiality and talked to united, they ran out of the meeting for the nearest fire exit. united airlines is in a desperate financial situation. They are arrogant enough to walk into a potential meeting about merger possibilities and offer the partner a pay off to screw their employees. Continental and Delta saw through this and ended the meeting promptly and kicked tiltons rear end out.


doug parker was the last choice, but they knew he will sell his soul.

All employees should fight this, usapa is a bump in the road compared to the alpa united pilots agenda and tiltons greed.

WHY UNITED IS FAILING AGAIN

By Joe Brancatelli

April 24, 2008 -- Even during a week of Big Six crisis, United Airlines'
troubles stand out: On Tuesday, it registered a $537 million first-quarter
loss, more than American and Continental combined. United shares then
plunged by more than 35 percent. Yesterday it was forced to deny that it
might default on key loan covenants.

The 1Q loss, which offsets most of the profit that United registered since
exiting bankruptcy on February 1, 2006, has sent the self-aggrandizing
boobs who run the airline into full panic mode. On Tuesday, United imposed
a blizzard of new fees and restrictions. It raised fares by 3-5 percent,
or as much as $70 roundtrip, this afternoon. And the airline announced it
would slash capacity again, ground more planes and lay off more rank and
filers.

'The path to sustainable profitability requires us to fundamentally
overhaul every facet of our business,' chief executive Glenn Tilton said
Tuesday. He then once again begged someone to buy out his airline under
the guise of industry-wide 'consolidation,' a strategy he has pursued
since he called in Goldman Sachs six months after United emerged from
Chapter 11.

The problem with Tilton the Terrible's pronouncements? The every-facet
overhaul will be on a business plan that is just 28 months old. It's the
cynical, horrifically flawed 'strategy' crafted after a 38-month stay in
bankruptcy. Tilton's comments are also a de facto admission that his merry
band of airline killers got it wrong from Day One, have no business
running the nation's second-largest carrier, and may have finally doomed
what I called 'a rotting hulk of an airline' as far back as the summer of
2000.

And that is no second guess. I said it before United exited bankruptcy.
While the talking heads, mainstream-media stenographers and fawning
airline analysts praised United's new clothes, I stated the painfully
obvious: The airline was naked and doomed to fail again.

I reprint that column below. Not as a told-you-so taunt, but because it
cogently and clearly analyzes United's current situation. The problems
were there to see from the moment Tilton and friends loosed this nightmare
on the world in February, 2006. All you had to do was look.

JANUARY 26, 2006: WHY UNITED WILL FAIL AGAIN
There is a plethora of financial and operational reasons why the United
Airlines that exits bankruptcy early next month will soon enough be back
in Chapter 11 or desperately seeking a merger to keep itself afloat.

But United Airlines will fail again primarily because it has no
organizational heart, no identity and no definable brand. Most of all, it
has none of the vision and discipline that separates the winners from the
losers in the deregulated skies.

Consider the airlines that have had success of any meaningful duration in
the last decade. There is, of course, Southwest Airlines. Whether you like
what it sells is beside the point: You know and understand the product
that it sells. And you know that Southwest delivers it at every seat on
every flight on every route that it operates. Southwest's management and
employees are fanatically devoted to its standards of simplicity and its
unabashedly mass-transit approach to air travel.

Ditto JetBlue Airways. You know what you buy every time: a leather chair
with decent legroom; free in-flight satellite TV and radio; a sense of
casual style; and rational prices. AirTran Airways has found success
because it offers a definable and recognizable product: no-frills,
two-class service at simple prices. It even did the unthinkable--dump
commuter flights--because they did not fit the image or the financial
model. And before its corporate ego ran amok, Continental Airlines had a
profitable run. Why? It crafted a demonstrably higher quality of
'traditional' full-service flying and then reworked its management, crews,
fleet and operations until the airline was a consistent and marketable
whole.

United has done none of those things during its 38 months in Chapter 11.
In a market that has proven it will only support consistency, United
Airlines is a bizarre amalgam of in-flight products, fleet configurations
and service concepts. It cynically tries to be all things to all flyers
and careens from idea to idea, cabin to cabin and fare to fare, sometimes
on a route-by-route basis.

In fact, United isn't. Not in concept or in execution. It is a disjointed
collection of flights run by executives with no overarching vision, no
unifying commitment and no marketing or brand discipline. In every
conceivable way, United is the opposite of what works in the sky.

United will emerge from the most costly bankruptcy in American history
with 26 separate in-flight seat configurations. It dabbles in everything
from the upmarket p.s. service to the downmarket Ted. It slaps its name
and logo on five types of narrow-body planes, four types of widebody jets
and eight flavors of regional aircraft. It befuddles buyers with an
ever-shifting combination of one, two, three and even four classes of
in-flight service. And like all of the Big Six, its rococo fare structure
is repulsive.

It is, simply put, an unholy mess competing in an unforgiving marketplace
that only spares carriers with impeccable systemwide coherency.

United's intellectually slovenly approach to air travel guarantees its
failure. But it's not just theory: United exits bankruptcy as a textbook
example of worst-case practices. Consider:
United's oil-price projections are fantasy. The five-year plan that United
submitted to its bankruptcy court predicts annual operating profits
through 2010. But its projections are based on oil selling for an average
of $50 a barrel. The market price of oil is currently north of $65 a
barrel. Given the growing demands of China and India and the upheavals in
Iran and Nigeria, the average price of oil could be closer to $100 a
barrel than $50 in the next five years. In fact, this week at the World
Economic Forum in Switzerland, experts contemplated the mechanics of a
global economy with $120-a-barrel oil.
United is swimming in debt. United will exit bankruptcy saddled with about
$17 billion in debt. It expects to issue about 125 million new shares
under the ticker symbol UAUA. While some observers predict the stock will
quickly trade higher, the opening price is likely to be about $15 a share.
That gives United an equity value just shy of $2 billion and a
debt-to-equity ratio of about 8.5-to-1. By comparison, American Airlines'
debt ratio is deemed much too high at about 6-to-1.
United is mortgaged to the hilt. United made hay this week with its
announcement that it quickly secured $3 billion in exit financing. What it
didn't mention was that the loan was secured with just about every asset
that United owns: fleet; spare parts; Atlantic and Pacific routes;
corporate headquarters building; flight simulators; accounts receivable;
and even the Mileage Plus frequent flyer program. And despite boasting
that it scored the financing for 75 basis points less than its initial
estimate of LIBOR plus 4.5 percent interest, United is still paying
through its mortgaged nose. An identically rated (B+) firm recently
secured a $4 billion package for just 2.5 percent over LIBOR.
United's route network is no longer admirable. The talking-head experts
routinely prattle on about the peerless United Airlines route network.
But, frankly, they aren't paying attention. United's Chicago hub is under
constant pressure from American at O'Hare and Southwest is growing rapidly
at Midway. Southwest has also returned to harass United in Denver, where
Frontier Airlines is also an established competitor. Independence Air has
disappeared at Washington/Dulles, but that isn't good news for United
because two much stronger players, AirTran and JetBlue, are now able to
make inroads there. Its Pacific routes are under pressure from some of the
world's best airlines. It faces brutal competition in Latin America and
Europe, too.
United is less competitive than ever. United constantly promotes p.s., its
three-class service in the New York-Los Angeles-San Francisco
transcontinental triangle, as proof of its commitment to serve
higher-fare, higher-profit business travelers. But United has little to
offer those customers elsewhere. The p.s. concept, after 15 months, hasn't
been added to any other route. Instead, United has turned huge chunks of
its domestic route network over to Ted, which has no first-class service.
And almost 40 percent of United's network fleet is now comprised of
regional jets. United has equipped some of those smaller craft with
first-class cabins, but those planes have generally replaced the larger
jets that travelers prefer. Internationally, United has aging
premium-class products that are notably inferior to the perks offered by
it major competitors.
United is stretched to the limit. United has improved its once-atrocious
on-time ratings during its 38 months in bankruptcy. But those gains are
constantly at risk because United has stretched its workforce to the
limit. After shedding about 25,000 workers, it no longer has the capacity
to cope when a few days of bad weather in Chicago or wonky computers upset
daily operations. Operations nearly collapsed under the strain of both
occurrences last month and United will probably be back at the bottom of
the on-time ratings when December's numbers are published.
United has no capacity to grow. Having dumped more than 100 planes in
bankruptcy and deferred delivery of most of the rest of the mainline jets
it ordered, United is stalled at its present size. In fact, its five-year
business plan predicts no substantive capacity growth between now and
2010.
United has a looming frequent flyer crisis. The no-growth scenario and
high load factors--United currently fills almost 82 percent of its
seats--also means that the airline will be hard-pressed to make good on
all of the frequent flyer miles it uses to keep travelers loyal. Worse, it
seems clear that there will be a torrent of new miles pouring into Mileage
Plus. Earlier this month, United moved its credit card transaction
processing to Chase, the bank that also issues the Mileage Plus credit
cards. Why the switch? Chase agreed to make an advance purchase of miles
equal to the hundreds of million of dollars that United must keep in
reserve for credit card refunds that would result from its grounding. That
means Chase will be churning out an endless series of mileage-accrual
offers that United's static capacity won't be able to easily absorb.
United's top managers are focused on short-term gains. United's top
executives recently rewarded themselves with 8 percent of the new
airline's shares. This bonus plan, which The New York Times called
'insanity squared,' has another intriguing fillip: They vest with
head-spinning rapidity. According to court filings, 20 percent vest after
six months and another 20 percent vest after one year. Then 20 percent
more of the shares vest in each of the next three years. Bottom line:
Chief executive Glenn Tilton and his 399 top lieutenants now have a
financial incentive to make the kind of short-term,
shore-up-the-share-value decisions that are often incompatible with the
long-term vitality of an airline.
United's employees are angry. How would you feel if you lost your
stock--United was largely employee-owned before bankruptcy--had your
pension plan gutted when management dumped it on the Pension Benefit
Guarantee Corp., made two rounds of salary-and-benefit concessions and
then learned that the bosses rewarded themselves with a stock-bonus
windfall? Now you know the state of mind of most of United's rank-and-file
employees. It won't make for a lot of happy flights in the weeks and
months to come.

Sadly, for all these reasons and many more, from whatever day that United
officially exits bankruptcy next month, the clock will begin ticking on
the next, and inevitable, crisis.

 

[X-U]

Shouldn't the West pilots WANT as many East pilots as possible to upgrade as fast as possible? If Nic stands, and there is another merger, the lowest US Captain will be slotted with the lowest UA (or whomever) Captain and the West pilots will be that much farther up the list.

 

[BottomFeeder]

Actually, re-read my post. I freely admitted that UA's performance was far from good. I'm only saying that when you delve into the details, you can see two obvious thing:
1) It's not as bad as many of you on this board are claiming.
2) USAirways has a smaller cash position and I higher daily cash burn rate.

So if it is a race to the bottom (BK 2 or 3), guess who will get there first?

But to claim that in a merger with UA, USAirways would be the savior and in the driver's seat, and would insist on UA's pre-packaged bankruptcy goes beyond logic by any stretch of the imagination.

We lost count of how many times you been wrong so far. Heck what is one more time?

Wait till they get out the pruning chainsaw and cut off the international limbs of Untied. Then cut the domestic trunk and pull out the maul and split the hubs between the rest.

Like Untied purchase of PanAm's assets we can give you preferential interviews for possible positions.

 

[767jetz]

Wait till they get out the pruning chainsaw and cut off the international limbs of Untied. Then cut the domestic trunk and pull out the maul and split the hubs between the rest.

YYYYAAAAWWWNNNN...

Gosh darn, this is boring. I can see you have no new material or useful thoughts today.

 

[Freighterguynow]

YYYYAAAAWWWNNNN...

Gosh darn, this is boring. I can see you have no new material or useful thoughts today.

Hey 767jetz - what is the hire date of a UAL pilot 800 or so numbers from the bottom of the list?

 

[elixir]

That article on UAL was dead-on. As present-day conditions reveal. Mr. 76 has nothing better to do with his leviathon of a failing company but to troll the LCC boards because....? I'd get it based on recent news, but for a year?

Anyway, the beast that is UAUA is EXACTLY as described in the post...an amalgomation of ideas with no consisyency, no organization, and no common goal or vision.

"All things to all people..?" Impossible.

During my FUR from Airways, I flew as an RJ Captain out of ORD...what a freaking nightmare.

It is clear that UAUA is chock-full of negatives save for it's routes and widebodies.

767jetz has little to boast about, and indeed would owe every LCC employee an apology should this deal go through...his/her attitude is typical of what I experienced in my 2 years in ORD/IAD for "them".