Monkeywizz

Yes, first 10 planes are arriving now with the additional planes slated in 2025 to 2026. ATSG will place as many airframes as they can with ABX after the pilot group voted in a contract extention with below industry standard pay rates and below indusrty standard 401k DC. ABX pilots will not see another contract for 10 years plus.

abxflyr

One thing is true...you can always go to the internet (or APC) if you want to find opinions/half-truths. The ABX contract extension (AIP) becomes amendable in 2030 (6 yrs), how long a follow-on will take is just speculation. This extension came prior to any section 6 negotiations (i.e. quickly) and other negotiations have taken years. Therefore, any thoughts on contacts are just BS without basis. There is NO information on where ATSG will place the next 10 aircraft whatsoever. ABX is trying their very best to perform to a high standard and show they can handle the task of 10 initial aircraft in a short period of time. The hopes are that ATSG will award ABX with the next 10, or at least the lion’s share of them, but there are no hard promises.

Whatever ATSG management decides will be apparent soon since either airline (ABX/ATI) will need to prepare. I would speculate that upper ATSG has some idea of what they want to do but for now it's within the inner circle. As a side note, should the next 10 be awarded to ABX it would balance both airlines even (42-47/ea) with regards to staff, total airframes, etc.

Fingers crossed....time will tell

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El Pilot

So line bidding is based on senority? The only downside I potentialy see is that if you are junior, you may only be left with lines that are split rathar than blocked together. ie: 7 off 2x in a month, or worse which would suck commuting more than once in a month.

nitefr8dog

Everything is based on seniority. You probably would not be to happy
If someone hired 3 years after you was getting the line , vacation, or open time that
you were hoping for.

Reactivity

One particular element of our contract extension hints that we will have an answer to that question by the end of April next year. We agreed to a waiver to allow non-seniority list intructors to do upgrade training and LOFTs through April of 2025. But if we have a net gain of more than ten aircraft by that date, we will extend the waiver through October.

Reactivity

Our 401(k) DC matches what Atlas and Kalitta are getting. Are they also below standard?

What is the industry standard? Where is it written? Who decides what it is?

Please tell me what we were supposed to get and how we were going to get it two years before our amendable date when the other two ATSG airlines are nowhere near an agreement.

The way contract negotiations tend to go in this business, and in particular at ATSG, that statement would likely be true whether we signed an extension or not. We could take what's in front of us now or get nothing for the forseeable future. Would you choose nothing?

tallpilot

I'm not really sure why people are casting so much shade over this. Of the 3 ATSG step-sisters ABX seems to do the best in terms of contractual gains. No easy feat when subjected to extreme whipsaw and Ford and Harrison.

In some rare cases (United Tumi TA) rejecting an agreement results in real gains, however most of the time when time value of money is properly calculated delaying today's gains for more tomorrow doesn't pencil out.

Cujo665

management always exploits the weakest link in the chain to tip the scales. This time it was ABX, next time who knows. All three pilot groups will continue to lose until they pattern bargain and refuse to break the chain. Look at the legacies, they all adopted each others pay rates. Even much of the soft money is similar now.
do that with ATSG and there's no whipsaw left to play. Even better, file single carrier like the old Pinnacle, Mesaba, Colgan, and there was a fourth but I forget the name. They formed a single pilot list. You all are taking marching orders from the same place. Two of you are in the identical business.

Reactivity

I certainly agree. In this case, going back for more wasn't even an option.

What people probably don't understand about this is that it was not an ordinary contract negotiation. It came out of nowhere and was done in a few days. The company was offering a chance to address some of the things that the union had been telling them needed to be improved in order to improve recruiting and retention. They told the ExCo when they offered this opportunity that the company would make their offer, the ExCo could make their offer, and if they could quickly hash out the differences and come to an agreement, great. If not, that was that, The End. There would be no protracted negotiations. So it was clear when the agreement was presented to us that we could accept it and take those gains or reject it and continue with the status quo until our amendable date and probably several years beyond.

Reactivity

Are you really telling me, knowing what you now know about how contract negotiations go under ATSG, that given the opportunity to improve your situation before your amendable date, you would simply reject it out of hand because what you could get would not be enough to satisfy somebody else? Does our 401(k) not look much more like those at Kalitta and Atlas now? (We get cash over cap also. Do they? I have not seen any details beyond what's in their APC summary, so I really don't know the answer to that.) Don't you think you at Omni can reasonably ask for that and expect to get it now that we have it? It is a significant improvement over what we had in our 2021 agreement, which was already better than what either you or ATI have now from your 2018 agreements. There's your pattern - go bargain on it.

We tried that way back in 2016. It was not successful.