House,
If UAL hadn't illegally violated their scope clause I would agree that neither they nor the UAX companies would ever entertain such a notion for many of the reasons that you stated. The lawyer(s) who put together the UAL contract, put in some pretty specific language about changed circumstances and the like that makes it harder for them to wiggle legally than say UsAirways. Most of the other carriers are doing minimal flying, but they are still within the minimum fleet size/ASM requirements of their respective contracts. Right now, UAL has a reprieve on this situation until Mar 1, because ALPA agreed to abey that grievance(and another separate one) until then. After that the grievance goes to court so they know that they'll have to come up with some sort of settlement or leave it to chance with a judge(unlikely that either side wants to do that). Additionally, they want concessions from the UAL pilot group. As that article correctly pointed out, it's unlikely UAL ALPA would go for illegal furloughs and illegal SJ usage, then accept pay/work rule concessions on top of that. The company is going to have to offer something in return which is probably where these rumours of reduced SJ deliveries and potential furloughee hiring are coming from. United is going to be paying for someone's training on those SJ's, the real cost to them is when recalls occur and pull UAL furloughees out of the UAX ranks. Those are future costs which usually don't matter much to our management, who tend to assume that the money will be there then(it might be) or that if it isn't it will likely be someone else problem by then. I'm not saying that's a good way to think, just that it is the way our management tends to think/act. As far as operational impact, if a deal is negotiated to send furloughees to the various carriers, they will likely try to spread the furloughees as evenly as possible across the carriers, so that in the future ideally if UAL recalled 15 pilots five would come from Skywest, five from ACA, and five from Air Wis. I doubt it would work out that smoothly, but I'm sure they'd try. Bottom line, if UAL management hadn't slipped up and created a situation that jeopordizes their SJ and concession plans, messed with the UAX carriers expansion plans, and given UAL ALPA leverage to boot, we wouldn't even be talking about these possibilities. As it is they did screw up, so here we are face to face a couple of silver spoons!