737-800 question to gary kelly

[The Victors]

Gary doesn't have the balls to make an aggressive move. He's too busy coverng 6.

But on a brighter note....... 35 more captains got downgraded yesterday.

Gup

This is the most accurate statement of this whole thread.

 

[HalinTexas]

Maybe this guy is tired of every ATA guy blaming SWA for the fact that the ATA CEO did not have a good business plan that eventually led to the demise of ATA. It is not the SWA pilots fault that ATA went out of business.

An accurate statement, but not every ATA guy is throwing it in SWA's face. However, SWAPA didn't want us flying parallel routes with them, so we didn't. We were also told SWAPA didn't want a merger, because they didn't want to deal with an ALPA carrier of size. (We were 1100 foolish at the time)

John Tague, now at UAL, was/is an idiot. George Mikelsons had too big of an ego, and knew nothing, nor was he willing to learn, what to do with ATA in sched. service. John Dennison was brought in to mislead the employees into thinking ATA had a future, block Airtran from creating bigger headaches for them, and flip the turd that ATA was. He did so to Mattlin-Patterson, who used it to form Global Aviation Logistics that merged ATA, NAA, and WOA under one holding company. You can add more here. Dennison, the former CFO of SWA, picked the successor CEO in Subod Karnik, formerly of NWA and DAL. Another real winner, in over his head.

So, yeah, you're right there. I only speak up when someone inaccurately portrays the facts. SWA had the chance to already be flying 3 or 4 continents, but passed. Basically, for $120M in loan guarantees with a 25% equity, they got the competition out of the way, learned a few things about int'l/ETOPS flying, and sold it all off. SWA made $$$ on the deal. Last year, all the airplanes went to the lease holder/creditors except the L10's. Two of them. (I heard some ME charter company got 3 L10's for $5M for haj trips.) SWA bought the cert. to get the LGA slots for $3M. Again, SWA wins, but they don't get the ETOPS/MNPS approval, because they didn't take the planes, manuals, and procedures and turned in the cert. immediately.

If Airtran had succeeded in buying ATA in Nov. 2004, 800 pilots would have been on the street within six months. We were told that explicitly by them. They wanted MDW and slots. The rest of ATA would have retreated into IND and probably been down to 5 WB's. If the AWA deal had gone through, I'd probably still have a job, with a little bit happier group than USAir is now. The synergies there were pretty damn good. For some reason, that fell through and the next day SWA came in to "save" us. So we were told.

Sour grapes? Yeah. I have them. Didn't use to, but history keeps getting thrown in my face as if I, and/or the pilots of SWAPA and ATA had anything to do with it.

BTW, still looking for work here.... 8)