The name of this blog is "Things people Tell Me" as in here say, opinions...I pass them along as interesting. As a former reporter, now docent in a B-17 Museum, I meet tons of super-interesting people, engage them in conversation, ask questions and their lives spill out. Here is one of them.
I don't normally hear of conversations involving words that contain, profit and loss, or pension over-rides, loss, prevention, risk management, and other more sophisticated financial terms reserved for high-end Wharton School educational classes.
This afternoon, I did from two US Air flight attendants.
" Don't get us started they said," and they were angry about losing their pensions. Flying for years, and loving it, they interspersed their vindictive against the industry with the hatred of how quickly the commercial airlines dump the pensions of long-term, long-time employees who have grown with the same airlines for decades.
The reason? One attendant said, the profit margin of a
"really good airlines" was maybe 3%, tops. When JETA fuel jumps 400% as it has recently, airlines can't jump fares because you and I won't fly, so they swallow it and dump pensions and other items just to stay in the air.
Merging with American Airlines will happen, only just to keep their name around - they are already insolvent.
The other attendant said that some four-holer left-seat pilots (big jet left-seat pilots) will stand to lose close to a million bucks in PENSIONS.
I ASKED, " WHAT EXACTLY do pilots do after losing their pensions after flying all those years?" Flying for foreign carriers after the age of 60, until they drop over, or
" anything they can, until the end," she told me.
One, she knows, dropped out and is serving coffee in a cafe in Evergreen Colorado, nestled high up about 10,000 feet in the Rockys. He has a small cabin just up the Creek, and motors down the road to his job at the cafe every day meeting his customers, serving coffee and donuts. He'll do that, she said, for the rest of his life.
He was a jet captain for a major airlines for 26 years before he lost his pension.
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