ChrisJT6

He didn't give any jobs away, they were already being taken from us...the yes vote stopped the #1 threat to sUAL pilots.
I can't imagine how painful your brave scope fight was when you enjoyed ridiculous upward movement when every other carrier in the world suffered horrible economic times...you're the man and was fortunate to be hired at such an amazing airline!
Just curious, how much of your 20 years fighting scope as you say was at a Regional working for $24K/yr?

intrepidcv11

Aer Lingus A330's flying IAD-MAD for UAL? Hey bro, market forces. ANA starting a second NRT-ORD? Hey bro, must be market forces. Btw as sleeves pointed out the large RJ's aren't flying from Des Moines to Sioux City, but rather to our hubs from small cities like Dallas and New Orleans. Hey man, easily explained as market forces! Always love hearing the senior WB guy that buys the RJ feed koolaid UNTIL a commute gets wrecked. Once they got bumped by an RJ guy, it's full outrage featuring comments along the lines of "We should get priority for all seats cause we control the seats!"

XHooker

Funny, because I count over 30 cities served by Southwest that are now too small for us to serve with mainline service. Many of them are "small communities" you might remember serving on 737s or A320s like Indy, Kansas City, Nashville, etc. Without scope, the rest of the contract is worthless. Openers in a couple of years and expect another attack on our flying in exchange for pieces of gold. Some will learn from the past... some are condemned to repeat it.

ChrisJT6

Agree mostly but can u explain why with an equal or better scope than true/legacy competitors we aren't matching them in cities like the ones u mention. I see plenty of DAL AA mainline planes in those cities. DAL even has 757 service to some.

sleeves

My upwards movement even if your premise is true, that it was at the expense of your group, was a short term event. We gave you protections in the TPA. Even if they had not existed, the eventual SLI would have balanced everything out. Giving away flying with the lack of scope will never come back... Ever. We have also set these company's up to take the next batch of flying with the 90 seaters being essentially the same plane.
While I flew at the regionals I supported mainline scope. I think you will find most regional pilots do. The job you give away is not only yours but their future job as well. Most want to fly here not there.

ChrisJT6

Now that we rebeat the crap out of our historical mud fight...I think you will find a significant amount of your new fellow pilots agree and will fight a bloody war over holding the line on 76 seaters.

pilot64golfer

You want to fly to Nashville and compete with DAL and SWA? OK, what jets and pilots are we going to use? What about station personnel? So what cities that we currently fly to would you like to take those airplanes from and stop flying to those cities? We do not have unlimited resources. We have to have someone fly to those cities on our behalf because we can't do it ourselves and make money.

Despite how lousy management has been with the integration, they do a decent job most of the time picking which cities to fly to and how to stay profitable on those with the resources we have.

With regards to United Express doing some hub-to-hub flying as well as larger cities, its done mostly because of aircraft routing for the RJs to improve their crew and maintenance scheduling and filling in the gaps in service. So we limit this with SCOPE to a percentage of mainline narrowbody block hours, etc to protect us.

You may not like the SCOPE we have, but its industry leading by all accounts for the big network carriers and we are hiring faster than we are retiring, and the SCOPE provisions get tougher in 2015 and especially in 2016.

XHooker

No, I honestly can't explain it, other than our "industry leading scope" might not really be industry leading. That's just a guess because I can't think of another logical explanation.

I certainly expect that and hope our flag carrier brethren at DAL and AA don't fold either. It's a tough battle to fight alone.

XHooker

How about using the planes and people we used back when we flew to those cities and competed against the exact same carriers? Our fleet size isn't fixed in stone.

You're probably right there.

That might all be true, but we did use mainline planes to all of those places in the recent past. The cat is out of the bag regarding 76 seaters, but we've got to hold the line somewhere or we'll become strictly flag carriers and that probably won't end well.

pilot64golfer

Easy. Its not linear.

I have friends at DAL complain about cities they fly RJs into and we fly mainline into. You can't just look at one or two cities. You have to look at the entire picture.

Yes SCOPE isn't perfect and its never going to be. Let's not let the quest for perfect SCOPE be the enemy of a good overall contract.

I think if and when we get a 100 seat jet on the property as a net increase guys are going to feel better about this. I'm just surprised that there hasn't been an order yet.