Phil,
Thanks for the good wishes. I may have taken your post wrong. US pilots get bashed a lot.
A few items. We would love to see the RJ flying come to either the mainline or the wholly owned commuters. We have approx. 1050 pilots furloughed right now that would probably like to be flying them. I think the level of service would be much better. Problem is the company says they can't afford to buy the aircraft. I think they want to contract them out to lower cost operators, but you know what they say, you get what you pay for. They could put as many RJs on the mainline as they want today. We can't even stop them until we agree to a pay rate like some carriers can.
As far as costs go, we do have higher costs. In our last contract we agreed to a parity plus 1% agreement that was supposed to get our costs in line. That agreement led to us(pilots) getting a 17% last year! The people running this company for the last 5 years have been idiots.
Several of Mr. Siegal's coworkers at CO were at PI when I got hired in '86. C.D. McClean(sp?) hired me. I like the way they think and hope Mr. Siegal thinks the same way about his employees.
Tony
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