Free Bird

The fences are certainly the wild card right now. Im guessing we will see fences in at least some capacity. If rumors are right and 330's go to NY and at least some ER's go to Seattle/Narita, we will see displacements. To go a step further, if the company is aggressive with the movement of other equipment at other bases, it could be big.

The training cost would be huge, so to what extent they move airplanes around will be interesting.

Is everyone is agreement that the big picture will be let out of the bag by management by the end of the year?

forgot to bid

Just in case someone was wondering, when it comes to the displacements of 767 and 7ER pilots and how many "new hires" were put into them and so forth, the numbers are:

NYC ER - 105 since 02/07, plug 04/08 (2nd to last class)
ATL ER - 57 since 02/07, plug 01/08
ATL 76 - 55 since 02/07, plug 10/07

Trivial. I know if you're on the seniority list you already know this stuff.
...
5 more days till SIL, even if you don't care about the SIL it'll be eye opening to see what the company does next. Is the Investors Day on the 9th still a plausible rumor where then they'll announce the future plans (i.e. fleet plans?)

Xray678

I don't believe it's just a coincedence that the SLI is Dec 8th while a big investors day is Dec 9th. I have heard for a while that the announcement of any fleet plans is on hold until the SLI is announced. So I do suspect we will get a much better idea of what the future holds on the 9th.

FlyinPiker

I know you are just speculating, but when you say new bases are we still talking about -88's/90's going to MSP and things of that nature or are we mostly just talking about widebody equipment. It seems like if they were going to start moving things around they'd just bite the bullet and do as much of it as possible on one AE (with like a 12 month convertion window as you have mentioned in the past) to prevent multiple trainging events.

GBU-24

I heard the 90's are staying in SLC....for now at least....

Bucking Bar

Displacements from NY could be a good thing for the many pilots who either can't hold ATL yet, or who are commuting to NY to hold a better line than they could in a better base.

Serious question - if they displace into say, DTW, or MSP, would Delta allow a pilot to simply go on extended LOA, or voluntary furlough? Even in this economy there are a whole lot better options than getting bumped and commuting.

Particularly to Seattle. Seattle, people break in and pee on your rug, it always rains, the taxes are high and the coffee costs twice as much as it does in the Waffle House. The people are rude and the dogs bite. The rent on a one bedroom walk-up is more than your monthly income and it is a two leg RJ bag limited commute from anywhere in the northern hemisphere. I even hear the Line Check guys are mean there.

NuGuy

Heyas,

Things may not go as fast as planned. Cross-fleeting as been pushed until at least April, due to manpower and technological issues.

As an example....NWA scans and tracks baggage, whereas DAL still does it by hand. NWA uses this and other technology advantages to reduce the ground staffing to the point where NWA uses 3 people to turn a -9, 1 agent and two rampies. This divergent philosophy isn't something that gets harmonized overnight.

Other problems are more mundane, but technologically complicated, like getting a NWA release printed at a DAL gate.

Nu

JungleBus

LOL...keep working on em, BB

Uh...nevermind...you edited it...hah

Bigflya

Not a subscriber to conspiracy theory, if the SLI drops on the eigth and no one knows the outcome before then, one day would not be enough time for the company to evaluate how that effects them and make major changes. Now they could have plans A-Z drawn up and may just pick that speech out of the pile for the investors. They could also talk about general aircraft movements with no specifics. The next AE is rumored for Jan so they really have until then to put an exact plan together. I believe that things will be gradual as we move toward SOC. From the CVG displacement, we saw how much one category creation wreaks havoc on the system. The co also disclosed a few weeks ago that moving NWA/DAL aircraft around amongst each others bases is not as easy as they thought due to the various labor issues (I'm sure other than pilots).

We got some insight into what could happen for this summers schedule from the new destination release being 74's from ATL-NRT and A330's from SLC-I forget where. But I do not remember seeing the A330 listed as the a/c from NYC to any of the new destinations. Now that is the only tidbit of info that is in print that we can conjecture about.

BTW, I agree that the 90's will stay in SLC because they were bought for mountain flying performance. Also, sucks that we are hedged so high and cannot take real advantage of sub $50 oil. Good luck to us.

acl65pilot

What I am saying is that anything is possible. With talk of hinge displacements, it is really the only way that it makes sense.
I can see them moving stuff around. Fact, is that April would be in the correct time line for the summer schedule, as New pointed out.

The only wrinkle in displacements et al is that with the new CVG ER base there is not going to be a lot of LCA's available to do all of the TOE, so we may just DH that for the summer months and retrain in the fall pull down.
Now as for narrow body jets, it is anyone's guess. I can see a lot of that being moved. FWIW most of the IOE on the 88 has been backed up to April, so it does go along with what I am hearing.

I know that there are a few plans that could be executed depending on how the SLI goes down.

You may or may not see the a/c orders on the 9th. I think we will see hints at them ,or actual orders sometime this month though. I know that they are out there somewhere.