One billion in union labor cost reduction is not mere.
United's overall labor cost is slightly higher than AMR and DAL. As a matter of fact Delta pilots contract is higher than United.
Add to the reduction, the Salary and Managment (SAM) group, and the annual savings is well over 1 billion.
The company request for 1.5 billion for 6 years (included SAM, btw), used the most pessimistic forecast for revenue and passenger growth. Not to mention it was formulated by the outgoing President and COO.
THE NUMBERS WERE NOT FROM ATSB.
To think that the economy and revenues will stay depressed for the next 6 years, is absurd. If thats the case, then airline reregulation is on the way.
BTW, Usair only got less than 85% from pilots and F/As and less than 65% from IAM, compared to their initial proposal. Yet they got conditional ATSB approval. What caused Usair to go CH11 was their outrageous lease terms and all the parked aircraft they were paying for.
Coalition plan also includes lots of other competitive goodies that will increase the topline by over 2 billion. The outgoing managment team did not take any of that into consideration since they were not going to be around.
Bottom line, United will have a very competitive cost structure and it will have no problem paying 800 million in debt, when it has over 2 billion in cash and over 1 billion in annual labor cost savings. Period.
United will not go the Bankruptcy route, you can take that to the bank.