Originally Posted by
readywhenyouare
The best thing might be to call their bluff and just liquidate the airline and start over. Nothing but extortion at this point when you had some A350 captains making close to seven figures as reported on the DL pilots forum on Airline Pilot Central. These folks aren't even close to struggling like many Americans (unless they are living way beyond their means) so I don't see how they think they'll gain much sympathy from a strike. And they obviously don't care about the Delta employees who makes far less than them who they'll be putting out of a job. Just my opinion though.
The very few a350 pilots that were clearing that much were back when the a350 was being introduced to the fleet and was the result of too few pilots being qualified for the plane and full schedules set for it. The short answer is pilots were taking longer than expected to checkout and there was a mismatch between trips and pilots able to fly which led to those that were qualified picking up a bunch of trips beyond their normal schedule. You could argue it was delta management causing that problem just as much as pilots taking advantage of it.