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Eagle furlough changes?

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There’s no direct limits on Eagle manning in the AA contract, so there is nothing, other than economics, to keep Eagle from recalling pilots and/or hiring new pilots – at least nothing that I could find in the sections on furlough and “commuter air carriers”. In theory, we could bring everyone back if we could find flying for them to do – but practically speaking that’s where the ASM lock becomes a problem – eventually EGF would reach a point where there is no more available flying.

On that idea of finding more flying, I heard an interesting rumor from a “well placed source” in the union that ALPA and the company had talked about constructing lines below guarantee in the spring. I don’t know how likely anything is to come of this but it’s a start. I imagine it would take an agreement of some sort for us to fly to a lower guarantee, and I don’t know how likely the union membership would be to accept that – we seem to have a very non-cohesive pilot group, so getting any agreement might be tough. Still, it would help.

One thing that has been done, so far, is to avoid training the AA flow-backs – Eagle’s been paying most of them to stay home, though a few have finally started training. The company claims a couple of reasons, such as avoiding the expense of training pilots that might subsequently themselves be displaced by more senior AA pilots – but whatever the reasons, it has also kept a bunch of our jet captains in their seats, and when it’s all done, prevented displacements back into the company and furloughs at the bottom of the seniority list.

We’ve lost, unfortunately, about 25 pilots from the seniority list since the furloughs – so there are a few more vacancies there.

We’ve also heard from the planners at AA that in a general sense they’ve reached a stable position, even though they’re still losing a lot of money – there was a post on the ALPA board that they expected to be back up to a 90% schedule by the summer, and back to a 100% schedule no later than the summer after that. One problem though, is that the parked aircraft included all the B727s, (I’m not sure about the DC-10s) which means there are extra pilots (the FEs) in comparison to the number of planes, everything else being the same, so even with retirements, military leave and other things like that it maybe a while before they really get the recalls going.

I guess we’re looking at all this and, without getting our hopes up too much, figuring that maybe we’ve sort of reached the bottom – if nothing else goes wrong, and that maybe things will start to bounce back soon.
 
The DC10s from AA were already parked and the 727 retirements were just being sped up a little. As far as additional furloughs , they probably wont happen. Many who were being sent to SJU are now being given the option of staying in their original position.
The AA flow backs are not showing up to class in the numbers that were expected. The last DNR, captains charm school, had a lot of no shows. The FAs are either being called back or they are getting ready to start calling back the discussion in the training center was if they would have to redo IOE, so its probably not too far off. We are very shorthanded with FAs. LAX is going to be a jet base and the more bases we have the more reserves we need so thats a good sign. RDU should be announced late Jan or Feb, I know a couple of the guys who have been offered the chief pilots job. This is at least starting to show some signs of a turn around, now if we can get AA to start turning around we will all be better off.
 
Eagle call backs

I was talking with Mark Brown (Director of Recruitment) today at the AETC and he told he had recently spoken with Brett Lykens who is Manager of Crew Resources for Eagle. Brett said he thought that they will start calling back "some" eagle pilots in January. I trust Mark as a highly reliable source.

Val Jester
SF340/AETC
 
I was talking with a SJU based crew over this past weekend, and they said that nearly all of the furlough SJU-based ground support types have been recalled.

However, that falls into place of what the president of the SJU operation said back in September, that the furloughs of the ground support folks would only be temporary - as long as the planned increase in flying for the winter season actually happened.

Not sure about the SJU based F/As.
 

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