Carl Spackler

You're really saying that major pilots should never have the right to flying that they once had. Once they lost it, it's gone forever. Too bad major dudes. If you even try to regain flying, you are fostering disunity.

You are totally bastardizing the meaning of "unity" acl.

Carl

Carl Spackler

This is the very essence of ALPA's conflicted representational structure.

Carl

alfaromeo

Easy, the jobs of the regional pilots will not go away, they would just be absorbed into mainline where those same pilots would love to be. The answer is so obvious I don't see how you miss it.

Wasatch Phantom

I'm sorry it wasn't obvious to me....

I have been (and still am) under the impression that DAL likes the idea that it sets the criteria on who they hire, and controls the hiring process 100%. I don't think they would be very exited about absorbing thousands of regional pilots that haven't been through DAL's hiring process.

While ACl's comment about regional pilots "...being good enough to fly for DCI means they are good enough for DAL..." may sound good, it doesn't work for me.

I don't want to sound like Carl's parrot, but he summed it up pretty well:

Totally wrong. It means no such thing. There are backgrounds among some regional pilots that make them unhireable at Delta. If they're good enough to fly your family at DCI, it only means they're good enough to APPLY to Delta Air Lines and compete like anybody else. No back door entries to Delta by hiring on with Brand X.

Reroute

CCAIR 2002. Duane Woerth refused to sign their contract because it was deemed too concessionary. Some CCAIR pilots later filed suit, but their lawsuit was dismissed.

dckozak

I curious why you would think DAL management would care about the pilots they hire. Sure flight management might feel exactly as you do but, where does any flight managements (opinion) sit with the real power at an airline, at the boardroom level and with the bean counters.

This is not a knock at Delta but the whole industry, at least that part which has contracted out part of it flying to regional airlines. Delta is comfortable enough painting other airlines aircraft (or its own and leasing them), wipsawing them against each other to create the cheapest contract, and creating a (false) impression to the consumer of providing a produce it has out sourced. If your management is comfortable putting my family on a regional, crewed by regional pilots, using your companies flight numbers and terminal facilities, why would it have a problem with the same pilots flying a larger jet??

capncrunch

There are tons of senior career regional pilots that have no interest in being "absorbed" aka stapled onto mainline.

Wasatch Phantom

Delta has never had a flow through agreement with any of their regional partners that I'm aware of. By virtue of the merger with NWA, Delta inherited the flow through agreement that NWA had with Compass.

I have no idea how many thousands of posts ago in this thread there was a discussion about Compass pilots having interviewed with NWA prior to being hired by Compass. However they were not interviewed by Delta and several forum members (I believe I was one of them) postulated about that being a concern to Delta management.

Honestly (and I hope this comes across nicely) I think that Delta has done a darn good job in terms of recruiting, and hiring first class individuals. It is extremely rare that I fly with someone I don't care for, and that's with 20+ years at Delta. I think others will confirm their experience is similar.

gloopy

There are many ways to do it. You could "staple" them to the bottom of the mainline's list in a similar manner like the recent flow throughs were written. If the mainline hires, a certain number can come to the mainline with a guaranteed class, or even just a guaranteed interview if hiring "the best of the best" was really keeping anyone in power up at night.

At the same time, one could bypass the flow/class/interview in which case they retained their regional seniority 100% but would lose whatever pipeline to the mainline that was offered. In bad times, furloughed pilots could flow to the regional, but any regional pilot would have the right to refuse to be bumped, however in doing so they would lose whatever benefit they had WRT flowing, etc.

If you are a big believer in the almighty gateway of the hiring process, you could set up whatever criteria you wanted, like degrees, scores on written, psychological and aptitude tests, etc to qualify for whatever conduit to the mainline that was agreed upon. Anyone not making it through that gateway would simply keep their current position and seniority at their respective regional and in no case would any regional pilot be pushed backwards on their own list against their will. Their list, on the other hand, would be subject to downsizing as flying was taken back by the ALPA mainline. But that exact same effect is already happening every day to ALPA regionals who lose flying to other ALPA, non ALPA and non union regional groups alike. To say that an ALPA mainline recapturing scope is unfair in that context is a stretch.

And in any case, it will be a very long time before 100% of all seats are on a mainline list, so "regional lifers" will have a home for quite a while. The only exception to that may be the regionals that go out of business and the regionals that don't sure aren't rushing out to ink cross company seniority preserving agreements so all cries of justice and fairness when mainlines talk about recapturing scope are disingenuous at best.

We have to start with recapturing the 76 seaters and limiting the 70 seaters and first at least see if we have the willpower as a group to negotiate that no matter what it takes. Don't be fooled by management's "We hate RJ's too" propaganda. They would outsource the entire airline in 2 seconds of they were allowed to and they are absolutely infatuated with 70 and 76 seaters being outsourced and you can bet your bottom dollar they want more of them (and larger ones too).

In any case, mainline pilot groups own the flying. Period. That torques some regional pilots off but that is simply how it is. Mainline pilot groups can take that flying back any time they want to. There is zero grounds for a regional group to sue over that either, since their own contracts are nothing short of predatory (against each other and especially against the mainline) to begin with.

Where is the unity in saying you guys can fight for scraps in a never ending RFP race to the bottom, but if mainline pilot groups start reversing that trend they are harming unity? There is not one regional pilot group, ALPA or non ALPA, that can lay claim to branded mainline flying because they can lose it at management's discretion and moreover, to keep current flying, they themselves will have to act with extreme disunity in one way or another, against themselves and/or mainline ALPA groups.

The problem of outsourcing is a scourge on the prosperity of every single airline pilot, regional and mainline alike. It is an issue far, far greater than the sanctity of the gamut of the hiring process. Any "benefit" a regional pilot sees from being the low bidder to outsourced flying is either transitory or deteriorating or both, and that simply has to be fixed. Like anything, there will be a cost to fixing a problem when negotiations with a party that loves the current system is concerned.

There are many ways to address/fix that problem that won't cause any additional ill effects on the ALPA regional pilot groups beyond what they already live with every day anyway, and that will provide significant career advancement and opportunity for those who freely chose to participate. And there are many ways to structure the solution in a manner that is inclusive and builds unity and all of that. We can even preserve a very significant degree of the sacred right of passage in hiring if that is indeed a major sticking point. There is no way to socially engineer a solution that pleases every pilot all of the time at every airline no matter what (even a "national seniority list" would be bitterly opposed by many, many pilot groups and is a horrible idea for a ton of reasons).

In any case it is up to the mainlines to start reversing the cancerous trend of outsourcing. And as a previous poster mentioned, we shouldn't be too concerned with management's cries for preserving the integrity of the hiring process as a reason why we shouldn't reverse outsourcing. They had no problem outsourcing half our flights, block hours and pilot jobs. In fact they couldn't do it fast enough and rewarded themselves generously whenever they saved money doing so. They have absolute zero moral ground to stand on regarding this issue.

Mesabah

That is a function of how management has to comply with the provisions of the scope recapture. This is how management gets ALPA to run and hide when scope is brought up. All management has to do is adjust the career expectations of regional pilots and force a merger with the mainline. Under the American legal system regional pilots will be stepping into captain positions at Delta.

This is solely a function of management, the only way to get flying back once it is gone is to get management to want to put that flying back on the mainline. ALPA does not have the political will power to recapture flying, neither will any other union.