The following letter to all furloughees who have bypassed a CAL job offer is from the MEC Furlough Coordinator.

The company sent out an update on Tuesday, August 28 to all furloughees on their “Furloughed Pilots” mailing list. I am passing this along in an effort to insure that ALL United furloughees who have bypassed a CAL job offer that may be contemplating the possibility of going to CAL later this year are aware of the class openings currently being offered.

As you are aware the company has made job offers at CAL to all 1,436 United furloughees under the terms of the Merger Transition and Process Agreement. The most junior 248 United furloughees received their CAL offer in July for a fall start. In order to accommodate the number of pilots who accepted these offers, as well as those who came off of bypass and military deferment, classes were added and filled through the end of October 2012. With the attached announcement further classes have been added through the end of the year. The first class of the scheduled fall classes started this past Tuesday, 28 August 2012, and further classes are currently scheduled to start each Tuesday through the end of the year, except for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Each class will be a class of 12. The classes to be filled in November and December 2012 will be filled in seniority order with United Furloughees who come off of bypass or military deferment by notifying Captain V by close of business (16:00 CDT), Monday, 10 September 2012. When coming off of bypass or military deferment please state your availability date in order to be placed in a desired class or a class thereafter that your seniority can hold. If needed, new hires off of the street will be placed in remaining slots in these classes in accordance with the Merger Transition and Process Agreement. Based on anticipated manpower needs at CAL we expect further class offerings to become available at the beginning of 2013 and continue through the Spring.

In closing I wanted to address the other part of the attached update, the announcement by the company that there will be NO recall classes starting at United before the end of the year. This news has been very upsetting to the furloughed pilot group, who were sacrificed to make this merger happen. Despite all efforts by the UAL MEC System Schedule Committee and the MEC Officers to make the company begin the process of returning our Furloughed Pilots to United, the company continues to drag its feet, even knowing that retirements are coming and understaffing has affected the operation this summer. The understaffing problem at United was even highlighted in Captain Jay Heppner’s Labor Day Message: “With chronic under-staffing and numerous other mismanaged aspects of this merger, including last week’s “connectivity problem” that delayed hundreds of flights, combined with seasonal weather, heavy customer demand and other distractions, this past summer was especially challenging.” We find this announcement to be discouraging and short sighted by this “new” management group, and we will continue to do all we can to insist that the company begin the recall process to return our furloughees to United.