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Old 04-02-2007, 12:55 PM   #1 (permalink)
Tambralyn
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Default Possible Changes at AE

DH tells me that there may be a change at AE soon, depending on the results of an upcoming election. They were doing this at TSA when John was in scheduling there.

I jokingly asked John when he was going to make captain, and he responded "Maybe sooner than you think." Apparently, AA has started calling up a lot of their TWA flowbacks, and now Eagle is getting low on captains. They are talking about qualifying some of their higher seniority FOs as Captains. This sounds great, doesn't it? Well, what they plan to do is qualify them, but keep them as FOs, occasionally calling them to sit in the left seat. When they do, they'll make an extra $10/hr. Still sounded pretty good to me.

But John's concern is that they'll just stop promoting at all. He saw it happen at TSA. They qualified a bunch of FOs, started using them like crazy to act as captain, and didn't give the actual captains any decent lines. Kept them at or below minimum because the qualified FOs were cheaper.

So, if your SO feels strongly about this issue, remind him to vote in the upcoming election. John has never voted before, but he said he's gonna make d**n sure he does this time. He's pretty adamently against it.

I know it sounds like a raw deal for the current captains, but I'm not sure about how bad it would be for the FOs. I suppose it kind of depends on their goals. If they were planning on becoming captains and retiring from AE, that would be pretty bad. If they're planning on using AE as a stepping stone to the majors, it might not be such a terrible thing, because at least they'd be getting PIC hours, which they're not now. They told John when he hired on it could 5 - 8 years to make it to captain, so that would speed up his timetable quite a bit.

What do you think?
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