American Airlines offers higher pay to pilots

American Airlines Group Inc. proposed a new labor contract Tuesday that it said would give American Airlines pilots the highest pay among their peers in the U.S. airline industry.

As it did so, the company headed off a potential confrontation with its pilots’ union by killing a proposal to put more seats on its regional airplanes.

The airline and the Allied Pilots Association are under a Saturday deadline to come to a tentative agreement. Unless they agree to extend that deadline, they’ll have to send unresolved items to arbitration.

American and APA launched talks July 8 on a joint contract that would combine the existing American and US Airways contracts. The two carriers merged under the American Airlines Group umbrella on Dec. 9, 2013. The proposed contract would cover pilots who fly for American Airlines or US Airways but not those who fly for the company’s regional subsidiaries.

The APA board of directors will meet Wednesday to discuss the airline’s proposal and fashion any counterproposal. While the two sides have worked out many items already, the high-dollar ones like pay rates have remained to the end.

In a message to members late Tuesday, the union indicated management’s proposal lacked details.

“Although management has characterized its proposals as ‘comprehensive,’ they read more like a broad outline of the contractual areas management wants to discuss,” APA said in a hotline message. “From our vantage point, the proposals appear incomplete, as they do not address many of APA’s quality-of-life-related negotiating priorities.”

American had been studying a proposal to ask the union to allow it to put 81 seats on regional jets flown under the American Eagle and US Airways Express brands. That’s up from 76 seats, a ceiling set in 2012 when the pilots agreed to a new contract during American’s bankruptcy.

In a letter to the APA board, American president Scott Kirby said adding the seats on the regional airplanes — which are not flown by American Airlines pilots — could have meant tens of millions of dollars in additional profit for the company.

However, Kirby said the airline left the seat-increase request out of its contract proposal as a gesture of good will to American’s pilots.

“Our proposal gives American pilots the highest pay rates amongst our large, network peers, and does so well before anyone could have contemplated. It is my hope that as we build a stronger, more trusting relationship that, together, we will be able to reach the best economic considerations for the 100,000 employees of American and the company in the future,” Kirby wrote.

“So today we take an important step to jumpstart the trust-building process. We would ask each of you [to] move forward in a similar spirit,” he stated.

While Kirby has been talking up the idea of boosting the maximum seating on regional airplanes for some time, the union had made it clear that the idea wasn’t acceptable.

In an Oct. 28 message to members, APA president Keith Wilson said the union had seen some hints that the airline was going to tie a better contract to the seat issue.

“That would be a mistake,” Wilson stated. “To be clear, the current industry-standard size limitation for commuter aircraft is 76 seats/86,000 maximum takeoff weight, and we’re not interested in anything that weakens that standard.”

The APA and American have been battling for several decades over the issue of “scope,” or who does the flying for American Airlines. The line originally had been drawn at 50 seats — American Eagle would fly airplanes with 50 seats or fewer and American would fly airplanes with more than 50 seats.

In the 1990s, the ceiling was raised to 70 seats. In the 2012 contract, American insisted on and won the right to fly hundreds of larger regional jets, and the ceiling was raised to 76 seats.

The pilots would be the second labor group to come to the contract-or-arbitration point. On Sunday, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents over 24,000 American and US Airways flight attendants, turned down a tentative agreement by 16 votes. That joint contract goes to arbitration in December.

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