Re: Mgt .vs. Labor
LRuppert yes a lot of people hate Mesa but they are not exhibiting American Free Enterprise thinking when they do. Mesa manages to keeps its costs low, like several other growing and successful carriers, like Southwest, jetBlue, Airtran etc, whom no one seems to hate much.
I am not sure really why people hate Mesa particularly, but I have a theory:
Mesa was one of the first airline in America to hire "ab initio" pilots through the San Juan (now called MAPD) program. As a result you had a bunch of 300 hr wonders flying around in nice aircraft. Even though this is enough to enact jealousy and scorn from other airlines there is a deeper reason:
These guys complained about how bad Mesa was. The fact was they didn't know any better. They hadn't been around aviation long enough to know that what they were complaining about was just aviation and airline stuff! NO airline guarantees weekends and holidays off. NO airline guarantees you will work where you live. NO airline flies absolutely perfect equipment all the time. Out of the 5 airlines I worked for, I can tell you that Mesa had the newest aircraft/best maintenance hands down. But all the MAPDers would constantly complain about flying "junk."
Any aircraft that flies 20 legs a day 7 days a week is going to acquire some MEL stickers. Mesa was actually very good at clearing them. I still shudder when I think of Eagle and Midway where the number 1 response to a discrepancy was "Could not duplicate, Discrepancy removed."
The cheaper flying didn't help either. Back in the mid 90's, Allegheny was flying a lot of USAir Express routes in the northeast with Dash 8s and some 1900s. They had one of those "good contracts" with lots of expensive work rules like duty rigs, trip rigs, double overtime, impact pay, etc. Actually it wasn't so much that it was expensive but unpredictible. The USAir and Allegheny bean counters would predict so much for labor costs for any month and the figure at the end would vary greatly, usually higher.
So Mesa (then the Florida-Gulf Division) was asked to make a bid by USAir, and they did: with a much more predictible (and somewhat lower) labor cost, which is just what Crystal City wanted. Mesa took over almost half of Allegheny's NE routes and absorbed quite a few of the furloughed Allegheny pilots.
Most of the "Mesa sucks" talk that I heard came from this event. It caused an emnity between Allegheny and us that lasts until this day as far as I know. It was so bad that if I was in five mile trail behind an Allegheny DH8 I knew I had to bring it back to near stall speed or they would force us to go around (yes - this happened several times. It was well known in PIT, all the ALG guys brought it back as soon as they heard Air Shuttle behind them.)
It's really a shame too, because one on one I had some great talks with ALG pilots in the Philly trailer and elsewhere, but as a group they hated us. Getting the CRJs ahead of them didn't help matters either. I don't think USAir did this on purpose (where AMR definitely would have done it on purpose!) as much as it just happened because of Free Enterprise.
You can't hate a company for good business practices and still call your self a free enterprise American in my book. I am sorry that the piloting profession (or any profession for that matter) is not what the schools promise them to be. The fact remains, however, is that Mesa, Chautauqua, TSA, Colgan, CommutAir, Great Lakes, etc. have a better chance of staying around than airlines with expensive and unpredictible cost contracts like Piedmont, Allegheny, PSA, Horizon, etc.
It's one of those facts of life that if we just accept and deal with we can get on with our lives.
