acl65pilot

I agree with that.

tsquare

Are you sure you work for DAL? You are exhibiting arrogance worthy of a SWA pilot. Why don't you throttle it back a little and throw the ladder back over the side? If Boomer and even Joe Merchant come to work here, that is 2 more guys below you on the seniority list.. and THAT is ALWAYS a good thing.

acl65pilot

If you follow traditional thinking and traditional thought processes, yes, but in reality to achieve what you want, it will take both the major pilot and the regional pilot working together to make sure we are not the proverbial hurdle to recapture said flying.

IMO, this type of thinking allows all of us to be whipsawed against each other. Only when you take hosing a fellow pilot or group out of the mix, will we ever move forward with owning more of our flying.

forgot to bid

Boomer,
Given the quality of your posts, sense of humor and so forth I sure as heck hope you get hired here soon.

A lot of people sometimes misconstrue the hiring of 22 year olds with low time (not 259 hours per se but not 3000 either) as a sign of a cheap airline, when in fact it had to do a lot with trying to grab quality pilots before they went elsewhere. Remember an old experienced pilot costs just the same.

In the same respect I hope the airline takes into account stagnation on the regional side, much of it our fault given we allowed so much flying to move there, but anyways I hope they take that into account and seek out quality FOs (as they did in 07/08) and hire the good ones. Boomer, I'm guessing you'd be a good one.

FTB
Sitting in ATL at the SLC outbound gate admiring the view.

newKnow

That stuff sounds like it happened a long time ago.

Hockey, why the animosity?

newKnow

Does that mean you are actually working?

alfaromeo

Pilots hold grudges for a long time, doesn't make sense by they do. There will be guys complaining about this merger 15 years from now. I hope Boomer and his brothers all the best. Kharma is a beeyatch.

sailingfun

The question was asked. The data is available. No spin. You just don't like the numbers. SW runs a very efficient operation that keeps their total pilot costs down even though their hourly rate is high. The total block hour costs are skewed in favor of SW because of the number of 3 and 4 man operations we have at Delta. Comparing like to like our block hour costs are around 650 an hour compared to 698 at SW.
Keep in mind that we have a higher DC plan then SW and we have huge ongoing funding obligations to the NW pilot retirement plan. They all count in total block hour costs.
Delta's pilot block hour costs will however go up quite a bit on 1 Jan. There is a 4 percent raise and a 1 percent increase in the DC. In addition NW pilots will transition to the full DC plan on that date. That ranges from a small to 14 percent increase depending on where the pilot sat on the NW matrix.
SW has a raise scheduled for next Aug if I recall. The correct numbers to use in a comparison will be the costs after both the SW and Delta raises and retirement changes are applied.

forgot to bid

Well, some grudges are understandable. I can just imagine the grudges in 15 years when FL Captains are close once again to holding the Captain seats they lost to junior SWA pilots in 2012.

DAL 88 Driver

Here are some numbers I really don't like:

As a domestic narrowbody Captain in 2010, my W2 was $100,000 LESS than the W2 of the average SWA domestic narrowbody Captain!