Piedmont, as you well know
, did staple the Empire guys to the bottom of their list. They did it with one caveat though. That caveat was that they maintained their Empire date-of-hire seniority for bidding as long as they stayed on the Fokker 28.
I am sure that the vast majority of USAirways (East) pilots would very willingly accept that they are stapled to the bottom of AWA as long as they maintain their date-of-hire on former USAirways (East) equipment and bases. That would be a far better position than many find themselves in now.
In effect, that is known as a "fence". Fences were the only answer to a fair integration of AWA and USAirways as the disparity between the date-of-hire and attrition rates was too great.
The revisionist history that USAirways (West) pilots are already putting on the integration process is incredible. They repeatedly state that date-of-hire was the East's position. This is not true, it was "length of service". They consistently fail to mention that the East's proposal included a furlough, out of seniority for any returning East pilots for a period of one year after the integration. They repeatedly fail to mention that there were fences to protect the West pilots on their equipment in their bases until the year 2014. A time by which many thousands of East pilots would be gone by mandatory retirement (age 65 was not official when the proposal was made ).
All this revisionist history is occuring and leaving unnoticed that their own proposal was a massive long term seniority grab. Their relative position stance had no provisions in it to account for the vastly different attrition rates between the two carriers. Their argument that the top 500 spots going to East pilots being unfair is ludicrous. Those top 500 guys were all hired before America West even existed. They could all hold international captain positions on the A330, B767, or choice Caribbean flying out of PHL. That and they would all be gone by 2014.
Typhoonpilot