Southwest Airlines Announces Codeshare And Some Pilots Are Not Happy
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But wait just a minute.
Who stands to lose potential flying if the airline goes ahead with this codeshare agreement, as well as the agreement already announced with WestJet?
That's right. Southwest Airlines' pilots.
Today the PlaneBusiness email box has received more than a fistful of emails from Southwest pilots who are not happy campers. To say that this is an unusual occurrence would be a hefty understatement.
Here is an excerpt from one of the longer notes:
"In really simple terms, and feel free to use it (just don’t credit me, a bit of a witch hunt going on here), it should not be called Code Sharing, but Outsourcing.
[Southwest CEO] Kelly and SWAPA negotiated a codeshare (outsourcing) agreement in the new contract during the initial current negotiations. This was about a year ago. He stated publicly that even though it had not been voted on, that he would honor that agreement. He has since come back to our negotiators and said he wants to re-negotiate that portion of the new contract. Meanwhile, he is doing all the codesharing (outsourcing) he can while he “slow rolls” our contract negotiations.
WestJet has announced 15% growth after our agreement with them.
Volaris says they will double in size.
Kelly cut 6% of our flying.
Now the rumor is that Republic is negotiating with Kelly to take over our short haul intra-Texas flying.
I am a 20+ year guy and am really disgusted with what is going on here. I spent several years at a Lorenzo airline and am seeing parallels that I thought would never happen here. The line employees realize they are just numbers to Kelly."