Moodys revises Jetblue debt to Negative

[sayagain?]

The Jetblue guys (management) don't want to hire extra people to be that third pilot. They want to stretch the rules and safety in general to get what they want. Some Jetblue people want the change too, hoping to rely on their A320 autopilots and the great blue coffee served from the young stews. Hopefully the weather will always be great on return to NY. Maybe I am not the $6 million bionic man like most of the Jetblue pilots----I am tired after one 5 1/2 hour leg to LAX from JFK. Maybe, oh maybe, flying to LGB is the Key---less stress than LAX......


Bye Bye--General Lee

General-

I'm still 50/50 on the transcon turns, but, what about this scenario? I just finished a trip which had us fly form IAD to OAK early in the AM. Once in OAK we get 12 hours rest and do a red-eye back to IAD. Now, I felt that I would be in better shape if this was just a turn. I was wide awake during the day but fighting to stay awake during the red-eye. What's safer? I don't have the answer.

sayagain?

 

[jbucpt]

You can't seem to tell me what you are going to do about the $89 an hour 12 year Captain wage on the E190? We have looked at our financial problems, so now it is time to tell us why you cannot change your pay scale, even when your company is profitable. A pay cut is for companies who cannot afford current rates. How about you guys and your new 100 seater?

i admit the pay scale isn't pretty, but its the nature of the beast in the industry we work in today. why do i want to INCREASE pilot cost per seat mile for a specific aircraft? when your financially saavy ( i.e. maintaining current profitable cost due to unforseen future events like $60+ a barrel) it has to be done. period. however, as jetblue has done in the past, if the 190 is very profitable, you will see a pay raise. just like we did retroactive in the fall of 2001. if the aircraft isnt protfitable then there is NO GIVEBACK. (the only thing ALPA has been giving lately) makes sound economic sense. (something ALPA has none of, and you have learned from)

so please, stop thumping your chest about union representation. when push comes to shove, all alpa has been able to do is BEND OVER, and then try and fix their loses.

 

[Diesel-9]

Dejavu all over again. Question of the night. How many airlines have started up and failed since DEE-regulation?

 

[Diesel-9]

Maybe the airlines should hire CEO's out of the oil industry. The cost to get a barrel out of the ground has stayed consistently at $12-$15. Yet the price per barrel has gone from $25 to $61 in just over a year with CH-11's coming everywhere. Lets start by hanging all the lawyers. Especially the ones running airlines who don't know how to spell leadership let alone display it.

 

[General Lee]

General-

I'm still 50/50 on the transcon turns, but, what about this scenario? I just finished a trip which had us fly form IAD to OAK early in the AM. Once in OAK we get 12 hours rest and do a red-eye back to IAD. Now, I felt that I would be in better shape if this was just a turn. I was wide awake during the day but fighting to stay awake during the red-eye. What's safer? I don't have the answer.

sayagain?

I don't have a problem with that scenario. We do that too. We fly really early into the West Coast and fly the allnighter back to ATL, or JFK/BOS from LAS. That is fine. I just don't like flying nonstop to LAX from JFK, waiting an hour, and then flying back to JFK with possible weather problems. Going the other way around is bad too, since that East Coast weather can drain you. Your scenario allows you to sleep somewhat. That is GOOD.

Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[General Lee]

Maybe the airlines should hire CEO's out of the oil industry. The cost to get a barrel out of the ground has stayed consistently at $12-$15. Yet the price per barrel has gone from $25 to $61 in just over a year with CH-11's coming everywhere. Lets start by hanging all the lawyers. Especially the ones running airlines who don't know how to spell leadership let alone display it.

Where did Glen Tilton come from? He came from Texxaco or Chevron I think---he was a Senior VP I believe. That is why he got a huge bonus from United---to bring him what he could have had at the oil company.


Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[General Lee]

Actually, his $10 million dollar analogy is spot on. The C2K contract guaranteed that the DL pilots would consume most of DL's profits and that's assuming the economy had stayed healthy and no 9/11.

Don't forget that DL's financials had begun to erode in 2000. In the first quarter of 2001, DL lost $122 million dollars. That may not sound like a lot given the magnitude of DL's losses today, but in the 1st quarter of 2000, DL had a PROFIT of $172 million. Clearly, things were beginning to unravel at DL before the pilots contract was signed.



You're right, but smart companies still do it. Smart companies keep their costs manageable so that they can survive the down times. Everyone talks about WN's now industry leading pay...what they don't look at is WN's productivity. The WN pilots earn that pay by being some of the most productive pilots in the industry. The WN pilots get raises that are sustainable (even in downtimes) and offset much of that costs with productivity improvements.

The companies that survive are those that look to the future, not live in the past.

That last sentence made me get a Kleenex. Wow. Academy Award for writing excellence. Why didn't Delta come to us earlier and at least take the first offer of 10% a year earlier? Were they thinking into the future with our 32.5% pay cut? I guess Delta was.

And, don't compare WN to DL please. Their productivity comes from their route structure. They don't really have a hub and spoke. Sure, there are some connections, but a lot of their flights fly in a straight line across the country, with multiple stops. Our business plan is built on huge hubs, with connections from a lot of cities that LCCs avoid---and put them on bigger planes to fly to big cities and often INTL cities. Our people working at the big hubs are very efficient, often working 12 flights a day at each gate, maybe more with the new turn times. But, our pilots cannot always take the next flight out. (Maybe the MD88 guys) Next thing you will say about WN is that they average more hours per month than DL pilots. Well, since they have one aircraft type, they don't have to go to 4 week schools when they move up or down from one aircraft to another. On the "average", we fly less per month----but a good percentage of our folks are in school----which brings DOWN the average.

Please come up with some more "profound" statements. I have the Kleenex waiting.....


Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[michael707767]

Actually, his $10 million dollar analogy is spot on. The C2K contract guaranteed that the DL pilots would consume most of DL's profits and that's assuming the economy had stayed healthy and no 9/11.

actually General, he is on the right track. Our biggest profits prior to 9/11 were about 1 billion. And that was during one of the best times ever in the industry. I think I remember our contract was going to cost the company about 2 billion over the life of the contract, or about 500 mil a year. So our new contract costs were going to eat up half of the profits Delta was getting during record years. I felt it was too much at the time and I still think it was too much. I never spent a dime of the pay raise we got because I knew it would never last.

 

[General Lee]

Leo Mullin thought "we deserved to ask for a raise." He said he expected us to do that. He then signed it and said "now you are the highest paid pilots, and you work for Delta." He was almost proud of it. Yeah, it was a lot, and he wasn't taking into account the uprising LCCs. Were we supposed to? We were making up for our '96 concessions. We could have done other things to make up for the loss, or we could have conceded earlier with our concessions, but the SERP program didn't help. The $2 billion stock buy back pre-9-11 really didn't help matters, but I don't remember approving that. Selling the hedges must have been my fault too. Hoping USAir would just die was my fault also. Parking the MD-11s just before the Iraq invasion and not seeing that we might actually have a busy Summer that year (which we did) was my first suggestion...... NOT taking the first couple offers from the pilot group was also the plan....



Bye Bye--General Lee

 

[SpeedBird]

Pilot pay increases during the last half of the 1990s was based on revenues that were largely inflated by the dot.com bubble and the associated record increase in high-yield business travel. While most people at the time didn't understand the artificiality of the economic trends of that time, it surely didn't take a rocket scientist to look back over the entire history of this industry to see that it hasn't been able to collectively show a profit since its inception, and that business is highly cyclical with generally short periods of strong financial performance when overall economic activity is strong. Pilot unions like ALPA got greedy and used only a snapshot view of the industry's unrealistic strong growth in the 1990s to peg their negotiated pay increases going forward over the long-term. The only thing worse was management's own stupidity and greed.

One final thought....GL, unlike a fine wine you don't improve with age nor with 5,000 posts on this mesage board. I'm ashamed to think I have to share the same profession with a knucklehead like you.