Alright, dumb question...Any chance the merger rumors are geared towards making the fence sitters show their cards early? I know a senoir FA who was treated not so nice upon return from voluntary furlough. Her take was the company was looking to run off the more senior employees. Perhaps a similar effort on the pilots' side?
I don't think that I'd link merger rumors with bypassers; the bypassers will likely sit it out until the last possible moment.
I elected to bypass to save my mil leave clock from starting to tick. I plan on taking the full 6 years mil leave, as permitted by UAL's contract (assuming that they don't dork it up in C2009). The latest stat that I saw was that 44% of the pilots have taken a bypass.
At this time, management is expecting to burn through the bottom of the recall list by the end of Feb - they're on track to do that. That will leave approx 1000 on bypass that they'll need to give one last chance to before hiring off the street. From the way that I'm reading the tea leaves, management is expecting most of those 1000 or so to never return. Personally, I only expect about 1/3 of those people to return; most are just hedging their bets in case FedEx/UPS/Southwest/JetBlue/nonflyingjob takes a dive and then they can use their United safety net.
Even if a merger were to be announced tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. It will take quite a while to integrate two companies. I would expect the furlough list to be depleted before any integration occurred.
The one wild card here is a change to the age 60 rule. Sen Stevens was able to get S 65 attached to HR 5576 (an appropriations bill). If HR 5576 passes with the S 65 amendment in place, it will be up to the House subcommittee to accept or reject it while reconciling the two versions of HR 5576. The S 65 amendment can be removed from HR 5576 before it is voted on in the Senate, but it requires a single Senator to make a point of order. Problem is, S 65 is buried deep within HR 5576 so that most Senate staffers are unaware of this development.
