I stand by my post above. Business or non business, this is what was told to us at EJA. We also were fully aware of the BBJ/Gulfstream Non-Compete clause, oh-well, business is business.
The statements made by the management regarding Forstmann, and don't care about 1999, we are talking 1995 and 1998 when the last contract was negotiated, this was their story.
As far as the Gulfstream Experience, it goes back much longer than 1995. In 1990, Mr. S made several public statements to pilots during meetings at Columbus, that if we just "hung in there", took the little pay raises during the 1990, 91 pre EJI era, when the Company was going broke and pilots were furloughed (yes we have had furloughs and yes I have seen the "puffed" quotes lately) that we "would soon be flying Gulfstreams". Again several dozen current pilots were at these meetings. There was never, ever, any approach by the Company to the Union regarding experience, contract training pilots, etc. Rather, without comment or warning, we read the same articles everyone else did about the formation of Gulfstream Shares and EJI. The broken promise is where both the discontent, and the 1998 scope language was addressed.
Reality is simple, in the beginning of the gulfstream operation, Santulli and Forstmann cooked up their plan, didn't want schedules and duty limits to be part of the equation. Original EJI guys were just given "goals" when it came to a schedule or duty limits. It has improved much since then, but to get the program going, all such pesky requirements were simply, in theory, un-workable. Another key was the Companies initial and continuing desire to let fractional owners pick their own pilots to fly fractionally owned aircraft, and in some cases to even mix the crews, to be able to hire "displaced" corporate pilots directly to Captain when certain flight departments were closed be EJ Inc. There is a lot more to the whole story, but the answer above addresses a single thing. Did RTS and boys tell the pilots at EJA and the Union that we could not have them because of "Gulfstreams"(specifically Forstmann) reluctance to use Union pilots. Answer, most definately, a dozen times, to me and others personally. As I said, was it true, probably not, who knows, who cares, but in the end the deception and broken promises provided a fairly tight scope clause, and the outcome had we not been given the scope, was well known by the same managers, every one of them.
