Major Changes On The Horizon

All,

The management staff has been in a constant discussion about how to better SPA. A lot of ideas have been discussed in the past month and a half or so and a “plan” was devised. These changes may seem a bit extreme but in the long run it’s going to benefit our VA.

Here is the plan:

1. All hubs except Minneapolis will be closed and all pilots will be moved to the Minneapolis hub. Here is the reasoning behind this: We currently have 5 hubs and 44 pilots, of which only 29 are “active”. That’s an average of 6 pilots per hub. It just doesn’t make sense to have so many hubs with so little pilots. Adding to this problem is the fact that we can’t find a manager for one of our hubs AND have had hard times in the past filling management positions.

2. Charters and cargo will remain unchanged with the exception that there will no longer be an FRT hub. One of the final decisions to be made is whether or not to create a hub for charters/cargo flights. Here are the suggested locations so far: Minneapolis, Atlanta, Alaska and New York.

3. A complete overhaul of our schedule. Switch to a dynamic, real world schedule. This would eliminate the “point A to point B, back to point A” that our schedules currently employ.

4. Creation of an Assistant position for the mainline and charter manager’s spots. This would give us backup in case one of the managers was away, overwhelmed, on vacation, etc.

I think that’s it. If I missed anything I’m sure one of the other managers will chime in.

The bottom line here is this: We’re stretched too thin and we just don’t have the manpower or the amount of pilots to keep 5 hubs open. To quote the VP of OPS, “We need to re-gather the forces”.

Barring any last minute glitches, we expect to have the changes implemented starting 1 August 2007. Please give us your comments/thoughts on these changes (good or bad) either here in the forum or via email.

As usual, thank you in advance for your input and if you have any questions/concerns/gripes/complaints, I’m just an email away.

Hey Dave, since you're the charter/cargo guru and we don't really have a plan on where to put the charter/cargo hub, would you like to pick a location or would you just rather have the hub at Minneapolis?