Hedley

Kirby really does want for United to be a premier airline for our customers and stockholders. His job is to provide that at the lowest possible cost, including labor contracts. ALPA’s job is to define what our cost will be. Our previous MEC was totally at fault for even entertaining the Tumi TA. Kirby smiled and signed it as fast as he could, hoping that we really were stupid enough to ratify it. That’s his job.

WildBlue025

Of course thats his job. My point is that there seems to be a lot of pilots here that get all giddy whenever he throws out a line about how quick and easy it will be to present us an industry leading deal. When in reality, in his eyes the TUMI TA was a great deal. Until we voted it down unanimously.

Or in this case, throwing barbs at other airlines. He has also predicted that Jetblue will go bankrupt after the Spirit merger, and now we will kick SWA out of DEN. He’s quite the talker. Maybe time will prove him right. Maybe i’ll be slinging gear on a Boomjet to Paris in 8 years.

El Peso

Is there anything more anecdotal and devoid of data then “every time I’m in ORD I see nothing but Eagle flights”?

Let’s introduce some facts, if only for a moment. In 2022, UAL had 18,206,543 available seats in ORD. AA had 13,418,161. Number three is DAL with 1,929,739. If you think that means AA is barely a factor in ORD, then UAL is too.

dailyops

It's amazing you think we still have a better contract than most...

Alaska, Spirit, JetBlue, Hawaiian, UPS, FedEx, Delta (+TA) all have higher pay and much better QOL than us currently. We are basically tied with American, slightly better than Southwest, and only Allegiant and Frontier measurably below us. There's quite a few contract comparisons already out before everyone started getting new deals that had us pretty much middle ground overall (with widebodies adding value), but now we're pretty close to bottom of the barrel.

Hedley

I think most of them are either addicted to blue Kool Aid, or they haven’t been here long enough to watch the broken record spin year after year.

MasterOfPuppets

yeah well that’s not who is applying here. So yeah they have all out done us for now but all the regionals and AMCIs are still worse…..ALSO we seem to be getting a lot of Alaska Spirit and JetBlue even with their “superior contracts”.

ita takes more then pay to make a good contract right? Or are you a individual that opens Section 3 and votes accordingly?

threeighteen

FedEx definitely does not have better QOL.

Layovers can be as short as 8 hours
2, 3 and 4 leg redeyes multiple nights in a row on some fleets
No offline commuter policy
Online commuter policy is extremely restrictive (commute in must be duty-legal to count for protection, even though it's not actually duty. And it has to fit within the same duty period as your operating leg, and there's even more restrictions. It's almost impossible to meet all the requirements to be protected if you're not operating domestic)
Un-augmented crossings from IND to STN, EWR to CDG in the middle of the night
Can be extended up to 36hrs into time off domestically, or 84hrs into time off internationally
Line-holders can be revised to sit hotel reserve for no extra pay
FedEx has something called substitution which is miserable
Reserve call out can be as low as 1 hour in Memphis...
You will be driving some of the most dangerous roads in the country to work from your crashpad.
They can take your entire trip and give it to someone else (likely someone who's jump-seating home on your flight) at 150% and then put you on the trip that nobody wanted to do, and you'll get 0 extra pay.
Pilots at FedEx sit Field Standby just like you.
25% of FedEx pilots are on PBS don't know their schedule until the last Wednesday of the bid month.
A FedEx pilot on long call reserve has to answer the phone 24 hours before his reserve period actually starts, on short call, you have to answer 90 minutes before you're scheduled for reserve.
When you finish a long call reserve assignment they can force you to start another assignment immediately if you're legal, or release you to min rest and then make you come back. Same on short call obviously.
Even once assigned a trip, reserves don't get any work rules or trip guarantees that line-holders do towards their leveling. Only international overrides, block hour overrides, and international per diem that go straight to their paycheck.

MasterOfPuppets

hmmm….looks like AA is a Distant second….

Grumble

Saw three over at A about two weeks ago. Surprised me. Yes having to move between terminals is a giant PITA. Done the “last gate in A to last gate in B” run. It sucks.

400 flights to where? Can’t grow anywhere. I keep hearing about DEN to HI on SWA but how do you think you’ll do that without augmenting? We block 7:59 flight planned at .83. Even if it was possible, a 737 can’t compete in CASM to a 753/777/787 on a stage length like that.


Needing to push out AA makes no sense as Ua was running 700/day out of the B gates precovid.

threeighteen

Southwest has plenty of new routes they can launch from DEN, to Canada, US, Mexico, there's a lot of domestic UA routes they can attempt to compete on too such as EUG, MFR, RDM, PSC, BFL, etc and they can also increase frequencies on current routes. But getting pilots right now is proving to be a struggle so we'll see how that goes for that.

That included the RJs which take less wing space, plus B had the full RJ horseshoe with the Conex gates, and the RJs that were running out of A, and UA was running flights out of C as well, all of that precovid.

Either way, we're debating hopes and dreams here. Most of these growth plans will be tanked by either the inability to hire pilots or economic troubles, or maybe both.