A folded newspaper fell into my lap as I was sitting in the "king seat" awaiting pushback in Newark. It was a USA Today with the headline, "Two Biggest Airlines Set to Merge," appearing above the fold. My co-pilot, Chet, had dropped it onto my dormant daddy parts and then flopped into his own lambs-wool covered "co-king seat" in an unhappy funk."I knew it!" he said. "It looks like the inevitable has happened and the airline world as we know it is coming to an end. Now I'll never make captain. It is bad enough the retirement age is now 65, pushing me back five years in seniority progression; now we're going to merge with these guys and they are all senior to me."I normally don't pay much attention to merger rumors. If I did, I would have no time available to worry about important things like who the next American Idol would be and how much money I'd have to pay for my next fill-up of the family's eight-cylinder soccer shuttle. This particular rumor had the appearance of truth, so I decided to pay a little more attention to it. After all, USA Today doesn't publish colorful pie charts about airline delays on their front page unless they have a reason ... or if Britney has had a slow news day.Apparently, our group of large, subsonic, people movers would soon merge with their large group of large, subsonic, people movers to form an even larger group of large, subsonic, people movers. Unless, of course, you count the large, subsonic, people movers we would no longer have to own or use because we had combined our operations. That is where Chet's fears were based.If the combined companies needed fewer subsonic people movers, they would need fewer pilots to pilot them. Because Chet is a pilot and because he is a relatively junior one who has just come off of furlough, it looked like he might be going back to his father-in-law's Ford dealership to change oil and put cardboard floor mats into F-150 pick-ups instead of 777 school next year if this merger went through.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/ceo-of-the-cockpit-80-the-urge-to-merge