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Will Spirit Survive if they WalK?

  • Thread starter Thread starter 8v8tr
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pilotyip said:
Back in the old days before de-reg there was a pact called "Mutual Aid". This provided income to airlines that were shut down by employees on strike. If the employees at ABC Airlines went on strike and the load factor on XYZ Air went up, some of the revenue from the increased load factor at XYZ Air flowed back to ABC Airlines. This gave the shut down airline a source of revenue to allow them to let the employees stay out on strike a longer time. It gave a balance to both management and union to reach a reasonable contract. When mutual aid went away, it gave the unions a much stronger hand. The highly leveraged airline could not stay in business with a stop in cash flow for any extended period. This lead to shorter strikes, and contracts company would prefer not to enter. Elimination of this aid may have been good for the employee in the short term, but is has been detrimental to the airline industry in the long run.
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11-26-2004
http://forums.flightinfo.com/showthread.php?t=43652&highlight=mutual+aid

cut and paste your old thoughts......

you posted this 6 years ago......!!!
 
Who would have thought Yip knew how to cut and paste. Or did he recall from memory?

Do you think he can text?
 
texkig?

GogglesPisano said:
Who would have thought Yip knew how to cut and paste. Or did he recall from memory?

Do you think he can text?
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Hey it fits, so it should be shared an important part of airline history that many may not be aware of. TEXT do you have to know how to speel for that? ha ha
 
Say what you will about Yip. But at the very least he is a good sport. :beer:
 
pilotyip said:
Hey it fits, so it should be shared an important part of airline history that many may not be aware of. TEXT do you have to know how to speel for that? ha ha
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To be fair to FI users, they should find information and history on Mutual Aid in Hard Landing by Petzger (sp).......
 
Rez O. Lewshun said:
To be fair to FI users, they should find information and history on Mutual Aid in Hard Landing by Petzger (sp).......
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Yea I only lived through it and had my reserve buddies who had been mutually aided by NWA and Nyrope (sp?) in the 70's tell me about it on those long non-stops to Purto Rico. They might be in the book.
 
Spot on Enigma-

Can you imagine anybody scabbing for a place like this?!? Some people are worried about the 50 year oldish pilots scabbing and some are worried about the youngish FO who think they will be lured by the left seat carrot. I say anybody that does scabs for this place has more than a few screws loose.

and nobody with a IQ over 10 wants to shut the doors of a place that makes almost $300,000 per day in PROFIT with 28 airplanes.
 
GogglesPisano said:
How good of AvWeek to allow Spirit mgt to negotiate in public.

If they can't pay Spirit pilots a decent wage, maybe they shouldn't be in business.
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Classic negotiation tactical press release. Those evil money gubbin pilots are going to destroy the jobs of 1600 people cause their so under paid and over worked.

Good Luck guys hope it comes out well. Hold the line!
 
They wont walk and if they do it will be for a few hours.

We live in an age of credit cards and pilots living check to check.

Good luck...
 
Spirit has more problems on their hands than an actual strike. Just the threat of a strike happening on a known date will start to drive business away from Spirit. Nobody who is booking a vacation wants it to get hosed up by a pilot strike. Airplanes are going to be very full this summer because of reduced capacity so if you have a ticket on Spirit on or after D-Day and the @#$% hits the fan you will find it nearly impossible to secure alternate airline transportation at the last minute. I hope the union cranks up the publicity machine and tries to drive bookings away from Spirit to get management off their a$$es.

The whole thing makes me wonder where the hell everything went wrong with these management teams. Southwest has done pretty darn well and built a great company by being decent to their employees. Why do all these other LCC's think that the path to success lies in treating your employees like dirt? There's got to be some smarter, more enlightened leaders somewhere in this industry who understand what's involved in building a truly great organization. On a per-capita basis I think the airline industry has more arrogant A-holes in upper management than pretty much any other industry I can think of except for maybe the US auto industry.

Good luck to the Spirit pilots and on behalf of all of us I thank you for being strong. If the management team chooses to take a strike and the company implodes then it was going to happen anyway at some point. The unionized pilots will get blamed but it won't be their fault if the management team uses a strike as an exit strategy from a bad business plan.
 
8v8tr said:
Aviation Week article may be of interest to some.....

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/gene...n&channel=comm&?WT.mc_id=twitter_aviationweek
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Personally, I think Spirit management is talking out of their a$$. They're required to give notice of possible mass layoffs, so they put a little extra pepper on it saying that ALPA might burn the airline down. They're probably trying to scare a few of the weaker sisters among your group. Now that they have abused the Railway Labor Act for 3 years, there's nothing else Spirit management can do but cry poor and try to scare pilots with verbal intimidation and threats through the media.

I find it really hard to believe that these Spirit management dorks are going to give up their cherry jobs just to "make a point" with the pilot's union. I also find it hard to believe that the airline's investors are going to allow what appears to be a profitable Spirit (according to the latest BTS data) to shut down over wage increases that to the outsider (me) don't appear to be outlandish at all. Maybe they will, who knows, but I bet a deal comes together as this deadline approaches.

I love Cheetah's idea of some sort of donation outside of the strike fund they will eventually get from ALPA. Hopefully it won't go that far.

Good luck to the Spirit guys.
 
ualdriver said:
Personally, I think Spirit management is talking out of their a$$. They're required to give notice of possible mass layoffs, so they put a little extra pepper on it saying that ALPA might burn the airline down. They're probably trying to scare a few of the weaker sisters among your group. Now that they have abused the Railway Labor Act for 3 years, there's nothing else Spirit management can do but cry poor and try to scare pilots with verbal intimidation and threats through the media.

I find it really hard to believe that these Spirit management dorks are going to give up their cherry jobs just to "make a point" with the pilot's union. I also find it hard to believe that the airline's investors are going to allow what appears to be a profitable Spirit (according to the latest BTS data) to shut down over wage increases that to the outsider (me) don't appear to be outlandish at all. Maybe they will, who knows, but I bet a deal comes together as this deadline approaches.

I love Cheetah's idea of some sort of donation outside of the strike fund they will eventually get from ALPA. Hopefully it won't go that far.

Good luck to the Spirit guys.
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Muchos Gracias, the inhabitants of the death star, aka Mirimar HQ, are about to take a photon torpedo down a ventilation shaft.

I'd be scared too. The investors are getting nervous if a certain "tipster" can be believed. Everybody except William Franke is getting nervous. He would be too if he understood that the average Spirit pilot no longer gives a #$%^&*
 
GogglesPisano said:
One of my freinds went through Spirit's "709 thrill ride." One of the worst experience in his 20-yr furlough-filled career. He has nothing good to say about their training department.

BTW, how are those 22-yr-old interns doing in the Airbus and how do they feel about the strike?
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I missed this post the first time I read the thread.

It's not the fault of the tng dept unless you lump the FAA and upper management, and SAFETY into "tng". No, I am not in tng or checking or safety - nor mgt for that matter.

Upper mgt has changed tng methods and SOP about once every nine months for the last five years. The FAA signed off on all of it. The fact that we have NOT had a serious incident these last five years is a testament to the overall aviation skill and knowledge of the Spirit pilot corps. Not only has the tng methods and SOP changed often, the overall philosophy regarding the proper way to fly an airbus has flipped 180 degrees at least twice. Additionally, management decided some years ago to allow us to fly into mountainous terrain third world airports WITHOUT specific route qualification. That is, we received tng on one int dest, and that served for all other international destinations. Not until we started Bogata did we get anything other than a read file memo regarding places such as Honduras, Costa Rica, and overflying the Andes enroute to Peru. Again, the FAA signed off on all of this.

Where was safety in all of this you ask? Safety was busy searching for incriminating data hidden within the FOQA data. FOQA data is protected by the CBA of course, but that doesn't stop the company from looking at it, seeing something they don't like, and trying to find the identifying data from other sources. (As an aside, FOQA data is intentionally scrambled and can't be totally trusted like a true DFDR can be trusted. It is close, but not exact) So Safety finds incidents that look bad, they do some searching in crew trac, put two and two together and some crew ends up on some super secret double secret probation list. Unfairly so, it should go without saying but I'll say it anyway. Again, the FAA is part of the lynching. They too look at the FOQA data and jump to the same conclusions and therefore are happy to join in the high tech lynching.

All of that, combined with increased scrutiny because of Colgan's incompetent pilots from Buffalo,(and some internal politics) result in the FAA knee jerking every time some Spirit pilot gets near the edge of the envelope. Or looks like he/she got near the edge of the envelope. If the data seems to be ugly, or if the offending pilot in some little incident happens to be on double secret probation, 709 baby. The union/mgt relationship doesn't do anything to help either. In the past, union reps found a way to maintain enough positive company contact to make some of this stuff go away, but in the current contract negotiations, that ability is obviously gone.

Gotta go, so I'll end with this. The problem goes much deeper than a bad tng dept. Issues like these are a significant contributor to the overall "Shut it down" pilot mindset.
 

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