Lakeaffect

Why did Frontier raise first year pay? Raising first year pay helps attract people and lowers attrition. It’s not a perfect fix, but it helps.

Lakeaffect

You think because we don’t want to throw away leverage, that equals we want to screw over newbies. How simplistic. Good vs Evil. Right vs wrong. The world is a complicated place, it’s not so simple.

gripngrab

Where have you been? Management lowered hiring mins to wet ATP months ago. I've flown with a 1500 hour flight instructor who had a "little bit of King Air time" here online last month. He was called when he updated his app to 1500.

gripngrab

If you want to help the cause, why not donate some of your hourly rate to a newbie?

Excargodog

Why do ten other airlines have better pay than NK without screwing over their newbies? Why should NK management worry about losing second and third year FOs when they can promptly replace them with cheaper labor?

Do you think management would worry more about losing second and third year FOs and junior CAs if they couldn’t easily replace them with new hires? New hires that they get for cheap? Classes are full. Plenty of low time FOs in CA constrained regionals willing to jump to NK for a new type and enough hours to move on. Management is using the cheap feed to beat the union at its own game.

How long must this not work to convince you it won’t work?

Excargodog

i’m not yet flying with FOs. But yeah, it doesn’t surprise me.

Excargodog

I did that even when I WAS a newbie.

Excargodog

No, I think you believe you have leverage when you don’t and you are unwilling to objectively examine the issue because it’s not you paying the price for your error.

CLASSES ARE FULL. Yeah, some are lost out of class when they get a better offer, but a lot of the attrition - probably most of it - are guys who AREN’T Newbies. My seniority number isn’t changing every month because of the people below me leaving.

If this keeps up all the CAs (that are left) are going to be doing unpaid IOE on very low time FOs. Is that your idea of success?

Lakeaffect

In the past negotiations 10 other airlines had management that valued their pilots more and chose to pay more across all longevities. Spirit’s and Frontier’s managements did not make that same decision and elected to go the cheap route. As bad as our pay is now, it was a huge increase from where we were. So if you are saying we should have negotiated higher pay in the past to not be where we are right now, then I agree, it would be better to have higher all around pay right now, but we don’t, so… Where we are now, in the present position is lower all around pay. The only other airline that is comparable to us (because they had practically identical rates) is Frontier. And what did Frontier do to 1st year pay? They didn’t wait for negotiations to start, they did it because it was helpful to attract pilots and stem attrition. What the other 10 airlines did is not relevant or comparable. The regionals are more comparable than the other majors/legacies, which was in a worse attrition problem than us. And what did all the regionals recently do to pay? Raised it dramatically and fast.

You’re looking back at what we should have done in the past, it’s not relevant and not accurate because you’re blaming a pilot group for the all around low pay instead of management.

This is not a hard concept, but you have dug in and can’t let go.

Excargodog

As have you. But I’d like to ask you TWO questions.

1. Since there is no guarantee that management will change, do you think we should screw over newbies in the next contract to the same extent as we screwed them over in the last contract because - you know - leverage?



2. Just how long would it take for the ‘screw over the newbies’ tactic to NOT work before you personally would be willing to admit it’s not going to work?