Pete's a MSP 200 CA, not MEM. He's pretty much a loose cannon, but I have to kinda back him on some of the ISL points. Which brings me to the "one list" thing. I'm not mad at the Colgan guys. They're getting the shaft, and the -200 guys are getting the shaft. The guys protected by the Bloch award? The -900 guys. For example, if I get displaced from my -200 CA seat, I can only bid -200 FO even though I have the seniority to hold -900 CA in pretty much every base. Why? Bloch award. The -200 is above the quota, so anyone can bid the CA seat. The -900 is on the fence, but will be under the quota for a looooong time thanks to the 16 -900s getting parked in January. So, you're going to have -900 CAs senior to -200 CAs that got displaced back to -200 FO. Based on what I've seen since the ISL, I don't see our "union" fighting to change this. Why? Most are ex-Mesaba. Now, that being said, if the tables were turned (as in quotas were skewed for the Pinnacle guys and it was a 9E run MEC), I'm sure our "union" leaders at 9E would do the same thing. The problem we're running into isn't we don't have one list, it's that we're not unified as one pilot group because mentally it's still 3. There are loyalties there extended way further than a year. The Colgan guys AND the 9E guys will be locked out of -900 CA positions. The Bloch award covers displacements. You can only displace into a position you can a) hold with your seniority and b) isn't protected by a quota. We saw this in 11-09. There were guys displaced that could have held Saab, Q400 or CRJ-900 slots. They didn't get them because of the quotas. The fair thing to do would be to attempt to get the quotas removed, and everyone holds what their seniority can hold. I don't think anyone (including Bloch) saw the entire Colgan operation going away in a year when the ISL came out.
If the company offered severance packages to try to get some the higher seniority guys out, I think you'd have a lot of takers. Depending on when they were offered, I'd probably jump on one.
The other question is what happens to the guys still waiting on training from 11-09? The SMART thing would be to just hold off on the rest of 11-09 until they figure out who is going where. The company doesn't have a good track record on doing the "smart" thing, especially when it comes to training. That's a HUGE part of how we got into this mess: mis-managed training and excess costs associated with it. The smart thing would be to combine training facilities since we're only going to have -900s and -200s in the future and just use the Eagan, MN facility. The company has deep roots in MEM and would likely just keep running two training facilities rather than give up on Flight Safety in MEM.
I'm one of the lucky ones. Odds are in favor of my being gone by the end of the year, hopefully before this train wreck reaches my seniority.
