August 31, 2000 Hotline

  August 31,
2000

LEC Elections
Any pilot in good standing interested in being a candidate for an LEC position, must
announce their willingness to serve by the October 9th local council meeting.
Ballots will be mailed out in October.

Local Council Meeting

Reserve D and Retirement Supplement

The following six pilots who have
retired since May 1 will be receiving retirement supplement payments retroactively: Tony
Eggers, Roger Rounsaville, Doug Stelter, Rick Wilbanks, James Souder, and Robert Ham. In
addition, Ed Carlson, Jay Middagh, Bud Koch, and Charles Tost will begin receiving
payments as they retire this year. My thanks go to Pete Neff and his negotiators, and to
each of our pilots who are assigned Reserve D, for doing the right thing for our retirees.

Labor Day

FAA Grounding Announcement

Mr. Parker tells me that mid-level
managers have the necessary authority to act, but have sometimes lacked the resolve to
prove their needs to upper management. The story I get from those managers is that the
capital budget approval process is byzantine, redundant, and frustrating. Even modest and
obviously necessary purchases get routinely denied. Large investments, like the training
center, have been delayed for so long that pilots sit for weeks at a time waiting for
training; this at a time when we are in a high demand mode and new Airbus captains are
having vacations summarily cancelled. Is it any great stretch to conclude that our
maintenance woes are the direct result of managers being told ‘no’ over and over by
finance people?

The airline business is dynamic. It
waits for no one. America West management has to decide if they want to be in the airline
business or not. If they do, they must start making stronger and more timely commitments
to infrastructure and people.

That’s it for this week. The next
hotline update will be on Thursday, September 7th. Thanks for listening.

  • LEC Elections
  • Local council Meeting
  • Reserve D and Retirement Supplement
  • Labor Day
  • FAA Grounding Announcement
    MEC Hotline

  Good evening, this is MEC Chairman Roger Cox
with the hotline message for Thursday, August 31st. Tonight’s topics are:


The next local council meeting will be held at 6pm, September 12 at the Best Western Grace
Inn in Ahwatukee. That’s at I-10 and Elliott Road. It’s council election season
so now is the time to come out and participate.

On June 20th, we published a Just the Facts which explained our
reserve D interim agreement. I encourage all pilots to re-read that issue. It’s
available here at the MEC office or on the Communications Committee page of our web site
at www.awalpa.org. The company has this week implemented Reserve D as you have been
notified on Maestro. From our perspective, the irony is they could have proceeded with
this in June if they had wanted, and it might have saved some delays and cancellations. As
has so often happened, the operation hung in limbo while the lawyers argued about
trivialities.


I want to remind everyone to attend the Labor Day March this coming Monday, September 4th,
in downtown Phoenix. This will be a unique opportunity for us to show our unity and
solidarity. Flyers with details of the event have been posted in the literature holders in
the Phoenix crew lounge. You’ll also be receiving a reminder by telephone and
postcard. I look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible.

Last Friday, the FAA announced that they might force America West to start grounding
airplanes if they couldn’t demonstrate that certain ADs had been done. President Doug
Parker assures me that this has been done. The FAA also said it had set a deadline of next
week to show that the maintenance QA programs were running in accordance with regulation
and our prior agreements, and I’m told we’ll also be able to demonstrate that.
This, of course, begs the larger question, which is why must America West continually be
prodded and threatened by the authorities to conduct their operations properly and
legally?