Andy- welcome back- I've heard Peru is a fantastic experience, and believe me I get the working for free for a while part of a business is not that appealing- I've missed the pool this summer-
You state it very well. Its good to have a non troll outsider give their perspective-ATN ALPA can never say they didn't influence their destiny. They cannot say they didn't have a good option on the table, with huge payraises to offset the logistics. It's amazing that ALPA convinced their membership to play hardball with us. That has never worked and theyre putting their future on the line thinking this would be the turning point where swa would stop acting like swa. It's funny, but we laugh and call ourselves the Borg all the time. It's not a bad analogy. Coming in humble and ready to serve and work is really not an option. Demanding an equal starting point as the company that bought you just lacks perspective.
Wave, thanks for the welcome back.
Peru was a nice place to visit. The poverty outside of Lima gives you a perspective on how petty we can be at times. Machu Picchu was great; I recommend going in May - great weather and you're a little ahead of the main tourist season.
My wife just got back from a medical assistance trip down the Amazon in Peru. The level of poverty in her pictures was much worse than I saw during my stay there.
Anyway, back to topic. I'm not a Southwest nor an AirTran fan. I'm not even a UAL fan; I'm at the point where I have a certain amount of dislike for every airline. And FWIW, my wife's an American Airlines Platinum Elite, not United or Continental.
I'm getting the feeling that AirTran's pilots have been given very poor legal counsel. They somehow think that this 'has to go' to arbitration. They are unable to formulate any scenario where GK pulls a Lorenzo and dissembles the airline as a separate subdivision of Southwest. Heck, I can think of two or three different methods of executing that plan.
A second problem is that AirTran's pilots think that there would be public outrage over such actions. I'm not a PR person (spent some time working closely with PR people a few years ago tho) but I would have no problem spinning this in an extremely unfavorable manner for AirTran's pilots. The pay raises alone that were on the table will turn 90% of the public against AirTran's pilots.
Third, AirTran's pilots view this as a merger of equals. Far from it. AirTran brings a large ATL presence and 52 737s to the table. That's it. The 717s are a liability, not an asset in this acquisition. Based on that and system efficiences from a Southwest style operation applied to AirTran's operation, Southwest will be overmanned with pilots for quite a few years. Southwest will absorb that overmanning with age 65 attrition and reduced flying hours per pilot. So there will be stagnation in the Southwest seniority list for several years due to this acquisition. Current SWAPA pilots will experience stagnation and less available flight hours for several years - these are material losses for Southwest pilots, whether or not AirTran pilots acknowledge these facts. I don't even think that many Southwest pilots realize these future adverse changes due to the acquisition.
At this point, the very best thing that AirTran's pilots could do is get some quality legal advice. I don't know how big the merger assessment is but AirTran's pilots should consider a fairly hefty one so that they can pay for decent lawyers because it looks like they'll be not only tangling with SWAPA, but also SWA management.
This reminds me of the AA acquisition of TWA. I was jumpseating on a TWA flight DEN-STL. F was empty and there were two other VERY senior TWAers jumpseating in F. They were discussing DOH integration among themselves. I kept quiet because I could tell that they were completely out of touch with reality. Had TWA ALPO brought in a good legal team which had laid out the best case/worst case/likely scenarios and odds of each, these two would have known that DOH had a .00000001% chance of happening.
SL9 offered huge pay raises (making it an easy PR thing for Southwest to look like the good guys) and seniority minus ~4 years. I think that they'll be darned lucky if they get seniority minus 4 years and no pay sweeteners on another offer. While I could spin this integration from both sides, the SWA case is much easier to make.
