What I find interesting is that the SWA pilots have already negotiated a side letter with the company on a growth ratio in case this happens. It seems that some Airtran pilots on this board, as well as a few SWA haters, think that Bond Mcaskill will prevent this from happening. We all know that there is a way around BM if the negotiations get ugly. Gary Kelly will protect his own first. What nobody wants to acknowledge is that we (SWA) are buying Airtran - not the other way around, and to say that the SWA pilots have nothing to do with your windfall really is just pissing us off like you can't even imagine. The company just didn't hand us our contract. I say BM doesn't seem to be working out too well for Frontier. It seems the Frontier negotiators overplayed their hand. Only time will tell!
I hope ALPA almighty does go ahead and push Gary Kelly a little too much! What I find ironic is that just about every airline that ALPA has represented has been through bankruptcy! To my future Airtran brothers: nobody over on the SWA side expects a staple so please do yourselves a favor and get real with what you expect out if this SLI!
And now you understand why AirTran ALPA won't sign a process agreement without a firm commitment to merge the two seniority lists by a specific, set-in-stone date. Some of you expressed confusion as to why the Process Agreement is being held up, the above is a perfect example of why. It's not personal, it's business... we refuse to put ourselves in the same boat as Muse. Not trying to be in the driver's seat, just making sure we're not a helpless passenger along for the ride with a bad ending.
I understand your frustrations with things being said on this board, and if you look back in the history of this board, there's at least three dozen AirTran pilots who are regular posters. The fact that only half a dozen are posting on here and only one or two are insisting relative seniority from the number 1 person on the SWA list down is the only way to go... well... you make up your own mind on where the *MAJORITY* of AirTran pilots fall in what we think is "fair".
I've noticed more of our AAI pilots posting as things get more contentious and more posts like the one I quoted here pop up from SWA pilot. It's a veiled threat, and no one likes to be threatened; it brings out the worst in people and our people respond in kind and it escalates from there... it doesn't need to be that way.
I'm therefore posting this trying to help "keep the peace" and I'm probably going to draw a lot of heat for it on our private board. The problem we have is that, from all experience with OUR management, if we don't "shoot for the moon" from the very beginning, we always come up on the short side of the stick. So some of our guys were doing the same here, not realizing how polarizing it is, just as your pilots who say "staple" or "Muse" is polarizing to us.
Fair will be somewhere in the middle. I'll leave it to our MC's to figure out where that is. I believe the majority of our pilots feel the same which, in addition to our MC's asking us not to talk about it on here, is why the silence from the AAI camp is so deafening. It's not that we're not engaged, it's that the silent majority is just that... silent, but listening and waiting.
Ya'll fly safe out there... :beer: