forgot to bid

I'll admit I took that a bit far, however, I'd take RA over him.

IMHO, he took a lousy company with a bull in a china shop personality and set the stage for it to do well and then benefited greatly from a good economy. It shows you the importance of having a mission and a direction especially in an industry that is as listless as this one and devoid of leadership.

But I respond poorly to his style and his "I knew I was rich when I could keep my house at 65 degrees year round in Houston." After a while one goes from being brash to being ineffective. I might be in the minority though. Not saying he did wrong. I never met him and if I did I probably would like him but for some reason I just think he's more a cleanup guy than a man for all seasons.

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Very interesting exchange with GB over the airline industry and the Colgan crash with PBS, for most of you, you'll really like GB even more:

FRONTLINE: flying cheap: interviews: gordon bethune | PBS


Really? You think $16,000 a year as a starting salary for a first officer is enough?


Can I tell you how they get to that, just so that the public knows? Every three or four years, there's contract negotiations between labor groups and the company. The company says: "We can afford to pay this much money. This is total dollars. How would you like to allocate it?" The union who's negotiating on behalf of its members allocates that money in a way that can get ratified by the vote of the pilots. You know who's not there? The people you haven't hired yet. You know who always gets left, because the captain wants $2 more? And everybody says, "Well, you know, my first year we didn't get paid anything either, so tough **** for them." ... The reason it's $16,000 a year is because that union wanted that money somewhere else, and that's the way it works.


It's the union's fault.


Well, you only get so much money. How much would you like to allocate? Would you like to have every pilot get $2 less than ours so we could pay the first-year people this much, or would you rather have the $2 an hour in your paycheck and let the first-year people go probationary as they are, like every other, and you were? And that's what they elect to do. ...

Dash8widget

You must not know many people who actually work there

For the record - I spent 16 years working for Horizon and know many AS employees (my wife worked there for 9 years as an ops agent before getting furloughed) - there are lots of great people there, but that's in spite of (not, because of) how they are treated.

A good example: a few years ago, AS was in tough contract negotiations with their rampers in SEA (by far their biggest hub). One morning, they showed up for work only to find that their badges no longer worked to access the SIDA. It turns out that overnight the company had fired all of the rampers and contracted their services out to Menzies.

Having said all that, I really did enjoy my time in the Alaska Air Group - but when it comes to how they treat their people, all is not as it seems.

Nosmo King

Sasha Grey

Ferd149

ding ding ding

did the "lightweight" comment give it away

80ktsClamp

I've heard similar. At least a few of the CPZ guys were FO's at horizon with an updgrade projection that got farther and farther as well.

That company can be very hard core when it comes to its employee groups.

forgot to bid

A lot of our LAX flying has been taken over by Alaska right? Is this to reduce the amount of overlap so in a merger we can say it'll have no effect on the market because we did not overlap anyways?

Nosmo King

No, I am smarter than the average ALPA MEC chairman and I peeked at the url...

forgot to bid

Found a new avatar pic for Sailing:



And Slow:

Ferd149

Marines...........what ya gonna do

But she's hot!!

capncrunch

I love every movie she has been in....even though I have only seen 5 mins of each.