Lifer,
First, I am glad to see you on the forum again. The more DL employees, the better.
But let’s make one thing very, very clear.
I have repeatedly said that I would happily yield the conversation on here to active DL employees IF they would also tell non-DL employees that the discussion did not belong to them and non-DL active employees needed to stand on the sidelines.
I have enormous respect for Kev. He is one of the most intelligent and articulate participants in any internet chat forums which I read. But he is a pessimist to the ultimate degree and sees doubt in circumstances that a valid sampling of the rest of the population would not see. Whether he agrees with my assessment or not, his continued negativity of DL and his inability or unwillingness to see any kind of positive balance in his posts does more to harm his credibility with the very people he is trying to convince than he could possibly know. I have far more respect for the positions of someone like Meto who has decades of experience at DL and other carriers and supports the union cause but who clearly can and does see balance. Life is far from a continuous bed of roses but neither is it a terminal case of chronic Ebola which is the way most of the union agitators on here frame life at DL.
But far more significant to this discussion is that Kev ABSOLUTELY refuses to take over the labor discussion and exclude everyone else that isn’t a part of it.
I have ZERO tolerance and will never back away from union thugs who tell me that I have no concept of what is going on at DL because I am retired from DL but they supposedly do because a couple (at most) DL employees told them something that they latched on to with absolutely no perspective about the rest of life at DL. When people like Meto can post that real life balance and say that he knows from his perspective that the culture of DL is differently better than other airlines and yet DL still has its warts and blemishes, then I can listen to him.
I will never yield my seat in the conversation to someone who tells me they know more about the company I spent more than 2 decades working for and which gives me financial and other benefits after leaving than they do having NEVER worked for DL.
So, lifer, if you want to be the chair of this discussion, go for it. Throw out all of the union supporters at other airlines WHO THEMSELVES are here trying to tell DL employees what is good for them while telling people who spent decades working for DL that they have no idea what is going on at a company that STILL gives them access to DL facilities and benefits with the display of an ID.
And as for whether I know what is going on at DL or not, may I remind you that the board of NW gave DL complete reign to eliminate the NW name and headquarters and many on here accused DL of engaging in a Visine campaign to eliminate NW’s culture.
You and no one else can argue that DL eliminated NW’s culture while at the same time saying that I have no idea what DL is about today because they have been thru a merger with NW.
Either DL eliminated the NW culture and retained what was DL - which is indeed very much like the DL that has been around for 75 years before NW - or DL incorporated large portions of the DL culture which I absolutely do know including eliminating major culture elements of what was NW.
Given that Meto has said as much and has been thru multiple mergers and/or acquisitions – the exact same number I went thru at DL – I can absolutely assure you that DL has been very successful – and aggressive - at preserving its culture in each and every merger.
But lest you think DL is unique, WN has done the exact same thing as well. there are far more vestiges of NW, WA, and PA culture at DL than there ever will be of FL at WN.
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I just stopped by the oft-quoted Facebook FA page and went thru a list of names and confirmed that a large portion of the number of people who are most active are NOT Delta employees. Many are other airline employees, precisely the very same thing that exists here.
DL employees do indeed participate at some level but much of the most direct comments are instigated and fanned on by non-DL employees.
That is precisely the reason why social media, including this site, provides absolutely no indication of what is going on at Delta.
The most accurate measurement is the fact that unions lost every major election during the DL-NW representation elections and there has been precisely ZERO new votes scheduled since those elections.
Attempting to frame anything that happens on social media as being representative of what goes on at Delta is nothing short of living a lie.
Dawg,
I can read your posts regardless of how you write them. The point is that it makes it impossible to quote a specific part of your posts when you reply inside someone else’s quotes.
I am not nitpicking but simply validating your input on the forum and inviting you to write in such a way that facilitate a conversation, which I presume is what you want.
As for NYC, you are right that AA has no choice but to have a hub in PHL because they are too small in NYC to compete against DL and UA.
But it still doesn’t mean that PHL will work as well as NYC could have because PHL is a much smaller market and US’ int’l route system is still heavily dependent on low value traffic to Star hubs which doesn’t exist anymore. The fact that Parker finally implemented as many seasonal TATL cancellations as he did and did it so heavily across AA and US’ NE US hubs shows that new AA simply does not have the mass in non-LHR markets to be able to compete on the same basis as DL and UA do, esp. in continental Europe. When you consider that DL along with VS and UA both have fairly large operations at LHR, AA absolutely has a strategic challenge when it cannot obtain the presence where other carriers are strong but other carriers can do that in AA’s key markets – and that is exactly the same issue on the Pacific.
