'grazydedog', may I assume from your eloquence and demeanor that you fly night freight <g>?
Actually, things are not looking good for the Polar strikers. Walking off the job with thousands of pilots already on the street has its precedents, none of them with happy endings as I recall.
Originally the plan was to identify Polar flight numbers and declare the cargo as struck goods to be avoided by ALPA carriers. However, in the murky netherworld of night freight and comingled Atlas-Polar assets this has proved exceedingly difficult. Some of the load has been carried by Atlas and even Northwest on the Pac Rim routes under third party "freight forwarder" airbills.
Meanwhile, cash rich UPS is looking at acquiring the Polar 744's ASAP if they can get the usual fire sale deal. UPS is having several 744 freighters made from scratch as they scramble to acquire the remaining ones for fleet expansion from pax conversions and the used aircraft market. UPS has done due diligence on Polar/Atlas before but decided that crew integration issues and other problems would not be worth the aircraft and route gains of an acquisition. Of course, if UPS got the aircraft without crews during the Polar strike, the in-house UPS pilot union would be happy and hold their head high since they didn't fly struck goods <g>.
There are precedents for much of this in the pax business. In the Eastern strike, the comingled assets were with Continental and ironically as I mentioned earlier, years later many of the guys that crossed the Continental line in 1983 ended up on the ALPA rolls in good standing (and yes, ALPA did want the dues money from them). Also, as UPS watches Polar's possible demise with some anticipation, ALPA national during the Eastern strike was lead by a Delta captain. Delta benefited more than any other airline from Eastern's shutdown, however, Delta hired far fewer Eastern pilots than any other major carrier and Captain Duffy didn't seem to protest.
Last edited by Airbubba; 1st October 2005 at 03:22.