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NJA to NJI

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Once again you are wrong Fido. Cats' quote was not a very good description at all. It was full of generalizations which is very typical from him. In one sentence he says we want to be on par with corp flight dept wages, and in another he says we want to do their flying for crap wages. Well which is it? He knows better than us, please tell us what we want.

pretty much the same thing you moan about scabs and non-union pilots doing in the airline world undercutting the well-paid positions. How sad that you actually think that's something desirable.
What exactly did I maon about? Half of what he says makes NO sense. If you were smart, you would understand that we are fighting to make the pay go up. If we go on strike and Netjets goes out of business, it will benefit people like you. If we go on strike and our pay increases significantly as a result, it benefits you once again. You have no DOG in this fight Fido, maybe it's best you stay out of it if you can't support it. I never asked you to join a union either. That is what makes this country so great, people have choices.
 
Live4flyng said:
Once again you are wrong Fido. Cats' quote was not a very good description at all. It was full of generalizations which is very typical from him. In one sentence he says we want to be on par with corp flight dept wages, and in another he says we want to do their flying for crap wages. Well which is it? He knows better than us, please tell us what we want.

What exactly did I maon about? Half of what he says makes NO sense. If you were smart, you would understand that we are fighting to make the pay go up. If we go on strike and Netjets goes out of business, it will benefit people like you. If we go on strike and our pay increases significantly as a result, it benefits you once again. You have no DOG in this fight Fido, maybe it's best you stay out of it if you can't support it. I never asked you to join a union either. That is what makes this country so great, people have choices.

Live4flying, you want to personalize something that is just numbers and your business model. So here's a few of those fundamental and basic things you want to ignore.

First, have you forgotten you sell "shares"? This means, logistically, a frac (and therefore you) serves many bill-paying masters. This in turn means that compared to an in-house department serving one corporate Master where the nature of things is to be proactive and streamlined, fracs not only need more aircraft, but given the 24/7, REACTIVE nature of serving them all, considerably more crews, dispatchers, CSRs, etc are required just to deliver what you contractually promise to a level of service they're accustomed. You're also doing this for profit, that profit margin supported by the "owners" as well.

As a result, for anyone buying your shares, there are limits to you being the best economic option for them. It depends on the type of aircraft type in question, but on the high side, if a purchaser's needs are much more than 350-450 hours per year, the frac model begins to lose it's advantage to a company in-house department. The downward curve increases with hour requirements.

The high side and steepness of the curve is also dependent on other factors. Stage Length for example; burning up the seemingly insignificant .2 hours from a share bank for taxi time ("Occupied time", a frac invention to maximize profit) every segment adds up to a lot if average 1 hour. In that case, a shareholder would burn up his 200 hours after only 166 hours of actual flight time...."losing" 34 hours. Quite a chunk. Fracs sell this by turning it on it's head....they claim they "only charge your time bank 6 minutes for taxiing, no matter how long it takes" as if that's a good thing, when anyone who operates aircraft knows that aircraft airframe and engine time-limiting mx costs etc, are takeoff to touchdown-accounted, not block-to-block, and assumes DOC's during taxi are equivalent to those in flight.

If the uninitiated "owner" doesnt know this that's one thing, and if fracs operated in a business aviation vacumn it would be unimportant, but for corporate the flight departments you wish to supplant those are some of the numbers they live or die by, and they know them very, very well. On a ledger, it's pretty easy to prove that you're a bad option for someone with heavy flying requirements.

So your problem about pay is integral to this...your economic desirablilty for a company that requires a large amount of flying diminish substantially, notwithstanding that from YOUR point of view as a pilot within that model you're worked hard serving all those medium-load masters. The model carved out a niche where you're desirable...if you increase your costs across the board for anything...including labor...the boundaries of that niche shrink. If you assume that companies will just pony-up additional costs passed onto them without blinking and re-weighing alternatives...then you're kidding yourself to a degree that I can't emphasize enough.

To them, you are the CHEAPER alternative...not something they can't go out and buy themselves. They live with your inherent disadvantages of less security/operational control/tailoring and using contract labor for a marginal cost advantage, ease of budget forcecasting, while retaining the tax breaks. Take away the marginal cost advantage, and you don't have much to offer this high-side segment.

When your union leadership talks about getting "NBAA" average pay, they are primarily comparing themselves to wages found in streamlined, serve-one-master part 91 operations that are NOT there to directly generate revenue and don't require umpteen people just to run a flight for them, airline crews around, ferry a hundred aircraft in a day, do the CSR shuffle, etc etc. as you do. Nor do they need to staff 4.5 pilots per aircraft.

That's why your model is low-wage dependent once the "profits" generated from large aircraft orders, etc. is stripped away. Low wages..not just yours...helped give the frac scheme the ablity to carve out the niche in the first place. That's why it's misguided to assume that just because you fly Citations and Hawkers and Falcons like corporate flight departments there's any similarity between the two. There's not a corporate flight department that doesn't show up as a loss on a company's books..the payoff is elsewhere. You on the other hand, have to generate profit directly from your flying to survive.

I'm a pilot first, manager second. Yes I agree from the pilots standpoint, you guys should be paid more than what you agreed to go work for. IMO, you shouldn't have if you're complaining now. But numbers don't lie, and you can't pretend companies/people with wealth don't have other options, and won't use them. Your "Owners" are under the same type of economic pressures, and when you're providing a service for your own profit these pressures effect you. In this regard, your frac model is closer to an airline's than corp. ops.. look at what's happened to ticket prices and wages over there due to that pressure.

Union rhetoric and non-applicable, selective comparisons by self-serving "leaders" won't overcome economic viablity. Loud talk about going on strike only hurts your economic viability... if you get everything you want and it's avoided your niche shrinks due to simple economics, and since the threat remains, alternatives look better and better. Your frac competitors and one's own company pilots don't go on strike. Hassles can easily be avoided from that quarter. Lots of contracts won't be renewed. Your outlook for employment takes a huge hit.

I do know your business pretty well, what's involved in running corporate ops, and certainly didn't invent the limits and desirability of each...they "just are". If you haven't bothered to learn them if your background didn't teach you, or think mere rhetoric or emotion will overcome them, that's your problem because it's not rocket science. For those that choose to learn, it's more incentive to either avoid going to work as a driver within that realm, or getting the he!! out if you're not happy the first chance you get.

That's really the only alternative unless you're way, way up on the seniority list and saving for the future. Understand that this is nothing personal, but if it were me, I'd spend my spare time sending out resumes instead of attending union meetings.
 
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This will be my one and only response to Catyaak - very appropriately named I might add - and I would encourage anyone in the frac industry to avoid feeding his/her ego by replying in the future.
In many respects you are correct Catyaak. The frac industry is no threat to any well run flight dept flying its aircraft 600-800 hours a year. But what the frac industry did was open up private jet travel easily to a segment of the wealthy who could not or did not feel they could afford private jet travel before. This is not a Chevrolet name brand at NJA. Our owners do not fly for value. They have - rightly or wrongly - a Mercedes image of NJA. If you disagree - fine - but I doubt you speak with many of them like I do. They fly for convenience, safety, or snob appeal. Don Imus cannot get through his morning tv show without mentioning Netjets. Like one owner told me - we are like his TV in the ghetto - he cannot justify us - his accountant cannot justify us - but he will let a lot of other things go before he gets in line again to get on a Greyhound/commercial airline at the terminal. We have made him a private jet junkie. And price shoppers are the most disloyal customers. Like it or not Netjets has a reputation with the wealthy - and if the NJA pilots do not screw it up with service delivery - it only takes a 10% increase in fees to owners to cover what the pilots here want. We are talking tremendous cash flow numbers here. These folks will gladly pay that, just as they would at their favorite restaurant to insure its quality. This is not the Chevrolet market with inelasticity to which Catyaak refers to in his conventional Econ 101 analysis - a course which was evidently his limit in Econ. Just look at how the real estate wives mock what the doctor's wife drives, copying them immediately when they change from the Mercedes to the Escalade. The same mentality is true at Netjets.
Once again I beg the frac pilots who post here to not dignify Catyaak's ravings with a response.
The only thing more gratifying than a fool raving is one raving in a wilderness.
 
"...just business..." I think that's what Himmler said.

You can rationalize this however you want but you are still trying to destroy someone's livelihood to benefit yourself. But that's nothing new. NJA has been robbing 91 dept's for years now.

NJA is the catburgler of bizav.

You may get the Gulfstreams but all you will do is drive down Gulfstream pay. No one is going to pay $100k for a straight-winged citation driver.TC

P.S.--I hear Gulfstream is in the market for a frac division. Hummmm.... :p
 
Man twa aa merger made you bitter. Booo friggin hooo.

I'll enjoy my 3 months off this summer. 7n7 and vacation. Gotta love that.
 
Diesel--It didn't make me bitter. It just made me determined not to let anyone else do the same thing and rationalize it away to salve their conscience.

Sorry, I've got a problem with people f'ing some else and hiding behind the RLA..

Enjoy your time off. Don't let the union politics eat away at you on vacation. BTDT.TC
 
"Hiding behind the RLA"

Now that is funny. First time I have heard the RLA being used in a positive. I think we get screwed by the RLA every time we turn around.
 
No one is going to pay $100k for a straight-winged citation driver.TC
This will anger you even more TC, it's already happening. There are "straight winged citation" drivers at NJA making that now. They happen to be very senior, but no less a pilot than you my SWEPT WING G550 friend.
Diesel--It didn't make me bitter. It just made me determined not to let anyone else do the same thing
How exactly do you plan on doing this?
 
old*art said:
This will be my one and only response to Catyaak - very appropriately named I might add - and I would encourage anyone in the frac industry to avoid feeding his/her ego by replying in the future.
In many respects you are correct Catyaak. The frac industry is no threat to any well run flight dept flying its aircraft 600-800 hours a year. But what the frac industry did was open up private jet travel easily to a segment of the wealthy who could not or did not feel they could afford private jet travel before. This is not a Chevrolet name brand at NJA. Our owners do not fly for value. They have - rightly or wrongly - a Mercedes image of NJA. If you disagree - fine - but I doubt you speak with many of them like I do. They fly for convenience, safety, or snob appeal. Don Imus cannot get through his morning tv show without mentioning Netjets. Like one owner told me - we are like his TV in the ghetto - he cannot justify us - his accountant cannot justify us - but he will let a lot of other things go before he gets in line again to get on a Greyhound/commercial airline at the terminal. We have made him a private jet junkie. And price shoppers are the most disloyal customers. Like it or not Netjets has a reputation with the wealthy - and if the NJA pilots do not screw it up with service delivery - it only takes a 10% increase in fees to owners to cover what the pilots here want. We are talking tremendous cash flow numbers here. These folks will gladly pay that, just as they would at their favorite restaurant to insure its quality. This is not the Chevrolet market with inelasticity to which Catyaak refers to in his conventional Econ 101 analysis - a course which was evidently his limit in Econ. Just look at how the real estate wives mock what the doctor's wife drives, copying them immediately when they change from the Mercedes to the Escalade. The same mentality is true at Netjets.
Once again I beg the frac pilots who post here to not dignify Catyaak's ravings with a response.
The only thing more gratifying than a fool raving is one raving in a wilderness.

I'm such a fool. That's why I'm here being wonderfully happy and you're...well....there. Try and sustain your business with Don Imus's and golfers if you want, the real money for the long term is elsewhere.
Besides, it's to my benefit if you get too expensive or, even better, burn your house down with a strike. In that case I'll be able to retire soon because just like I recommended to some to get into the frac scheme, I can always do more consulting work and show them and others why they should get out, as well as how to run their own deal, and bring the necessary people together. And I'll just be one of many because like I said, you're no big secret.

Btw, I know many of your owners too..outside the ones I steered your way. I know others that have gotten out after their first contract, extremely dissatisfied. The one you were talking to about "justification" was merely parroting WB's longstanding and well-known view about nobody being able to justify owning a corporate airplane (and then he went out and bought a Challenger, calling it the Indefensible). No doubt he's a disciple.

I do agreed though, you're not like a Chevy....you're more like a Buick. But have customers paying Mercedes prices, and they'll soon want a real Mercedes. I'll show em how.

So you see, I'm actually rooting like he!! for you guys and hoping you do something crazy. If I can get you even more POed than you already are, the more likely that is to happen. Every little bit helps.

Looks like my work here is done. Anyone need some lighter fluid?
 

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