maxblast72
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2006
- Posts
- 931
You made me go back and reread parts of Flying the Line, Vol II and Hard Landings. Eastern pretty much shut down operations March 4th when the pilots went on the sympathy strike with the IAM (book said only 120 out of 3500 crossed the line initially). By March 9th, Eastern had filed bankruptcy (probably Lorenzo's goal all along). You are probably right, Airtran would not escape a Chapter 11 filing during the first week of a strike. It took Eastern 4 months to get back to 30% pre-strike operational size.How about Eastern. We may stay out of chapter 7 with a weekend strike, but not chapter 11.
The Eastern pilots had a common enemy in Lorenzo who was canabalizing the airline by piecing it off to Continental. This hatred for Lorenzo kept the pilot group pretty unified during the early months of the strike. For as much as people complain about Fornaro and crew, I don't think they bring out the same anger at Airtran across the board. Eastern's performance was alot worse than the rest of the industry in 1987-1988 leading to Eastern's pilots anger in early 1989. While Airtran's 2008 performance was bad, our 2009 performance is projected to be pretty decent, and we are one of the few airlines to recall/increase pilot staffing as a result of projected block hour increases for 2009.
I think all of our pilots should read Flying the Line Volumes I and II, Hard Landings, and some of Dave Ramsey's personal finance books as Airtran pilots will face some difficult choices in the year ahead. We don't need to make any emotional or irrational decisions but rather good decisions based on reason and knowledge of the RLA, history, and the current economic environment.