I have to agree with that I believe. I was a junior captain, and before the merger I was already worrying about keeping the seat. Fuel was rising, this that and the other. I'd heard rumors that Parker didn't want the airplanes that were coming, and we had a lot of leased airplanes that could have been returned. I'm still in the left seat today as luck would have it. Looking back, I'm not at all sure I'd still be in it sans merger.
That said, now please allow me to straddle the fence🙂 To the east pilots, please realize Nicolau didn't find the west argument(or east for that matter) persuasive, and he stated such. To the west pilots, I'm not trying to belittle our 'pain' at all, just trying to be honest about how I feel. I'm thinking we'd have had a rough go of it as an independent AWA. But Parker has shown an uncanny ability to scrape along, despite the odds. However, even if we had scraped along, that doesn't necessarily mean thriving.