Flytolive

What's funny is how we too often forget what the alternative is/was. Before Kirby the Boston Consulting folks like Julia Haywood were talking about dehubbing IAD, DEN & LAX. Now that would have been some serious stagnation.

Just say no to scope relaxation. Pretty simple.

Bluewaffle

They can do that but they would have to forfeit all UAL and DAL flying to do it.

Chuck D

Totally! And if you buy that I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you as well...

Grumble

Really? If they start flying 90 seaters for a competitor, they forfeit DAL and UAL flying?

Source?

Winston

Could you please quote a reference for that?

Thanks in advance.

sweptback

Rumor is Julia Haywood wanted to make a large narrowbody order and that’s why she was cast away. In came the new guard that wanted all RJs, all the time.

Flytolive

We know what rumors are like.

Fact is she and her Boston Consulting (BC) compadres were headed down the road of dehubbing LAX, IAD and/or even DEN, United's most profitable hub. Typically galactic consultant stupidity. She didn't last a year at United and ran back to BC.

The 40 UA 737-700s are 20 years old. When you understand that 25 years is the sweet spot for how long you want to keep an airplane then adding 65 brand new relatively inefficient 737-700s doesn't make much sense. That is why management prefers up to 50 mid-life (2004-20011) A319s much like DAL did with 717s. Converting those orders to 61 737Max9s, four 738s & 4 773s was smart.

Just say no to scope relaxation.

webecheck

Max’s are 14% more efficient at cruise....and now our #1 cost is climbing steadily with expectations to remain high. How does that decision look now....plus the likelihood of adding some Uber efficient (relatively speaking) 100 seaters. If I was going to be critical for any of these fleet decisions, it would be that we should have ordered 100 seaters at least a yr ago.

Zoomie

Wow, that seems like an incredibly naive statement. Care to share where you pulled this nugget from?

The point behind the original 737-700 deal was because Boeing needed a "stop-gap" in their production line between 737 NG and the MAX. They needed time to retool their assembly line to accept the MAX and the -700 order was basically funding the "down time" while still keeping people at Boeing working. This was also why the -700 order was supposed to be all those aircraft in a 1 year period. There is no possible way we are getting the MAX's for the same price as those discounted -700s.

Kirby basically deferred our deposit and that capital expenditure made the United books look better for the next 2 years. Again, their priorities are stock price and their own shares for their own pockets. Back at the end of 2016, management (Oscar and Flight Ops) made a deal that was win-win for United and pilots. Then Kirby came along (placed at UAL by the new shareholder "plants" on the BOD) and decided there was a better deal for management without the pilots winning. Oscar and Kirby work together right now as "Good Cop, bad cop", but behind closed doors, the plan is outsource and reduce staffing while on the outside claiming growth at 4-6%. The stock takes a hit when we report this growth, but the theory is set the expectations to annoy stockholders, and then when the growth doesn't meet this, they make the stockholders happy and the net growth in stock is higher YOY(only my opinion).

We must realize in most industries nowadays, cutting costs is difficult because globalization has made most costs for competition pretty equal (there's no where left to outsource to), so the most efficiencies are made through cutting of staffing or cutting of wages (hard to do in this economy unless they can outsource).

Bringing on 65 more 737s increased staffing of our largest employee cost group, pilots. Right now Kirby can't decrease staffing so he's doing everything he can within our UPA (with creative interpretation) to reduce hiring. He's obviously done pretty well with respect to this when you look at hiring numbers since Nov 2016 (they are net neutral at best, and decreasing when you account for LTAs).

This new contract has their sights set on increasing utilization of pilots (efficiencies) by allowing vacation fly throughs, outsourcing of TK to retired pilots who would most likely work for $60-$80K a year versus pilots who work for $200-$250K a year. They want more outsourcing to regionals and JVs too.

Kirby made a stupid deal for United by cutting the -700s (long term bad), but it basically made him look good on the UAL BOD and raised the stock price for a quarter or 2 until we were hit by horrible PR like Dr Dao.

We are also increasing by 4-6% and we haven't netted one additional pilot since 2016. We haven't had increased utilization of aircraft. If we did, block hours and pilot staffing would go up. They have squeezed more seats into the same sized aircraft and added more 50 seaters and 76 seaters since Nov 2016. Now their maxed out on 70 seaters, so they open up the UPA early to see if they can get some more for ________ (fill in the blank). The big question is what is this carrot? Kirby is now quoted as recently as saying UAL ALPA doesn't need to give up scope to get a UPA by 2019. I bet what Kirby feels is a "give" is vastly different than what we feel is a "give". Probably similar to the removing of the weight restriction or something. Think about the smaller markets he could go into in Canada or CA or SA with 76 seat RJs with better weight restrictions, which you could argue is good for United. But, we all know in a downturn, the RJs will replace 737 flying and those small markets will disappear again.

Kirby leaving would be much better for us as pilots. He's a short term stock pleaser. That is the only reason he's there. If Oscar goes away, who generally sound like he wants to make United better culturally, there won't be any more nice guy around to offset Kirby.

Kirby is Smisek 2.0. I do think Kirby is better slated to make United better financially, but that could very mean we shrink again to post better profits. I don't doubt he'll cut the 767s and 757s next when we start getting 787s and the 737 MAX 10s, thus no growth again.

Flytolive

Then he is doing a really bad job because he has ****ed off Wall Street by completely violating their holy grail of capacity constraint.

All evidence to the contrary. Smisek was shrinking the airline while Kirby is growing UA and the mid-continent hubs.

Just say no to scope relaxation. Simple.