There's a lot more work involved than just doing line checks. Just an "oil change & lube" alone will take several people an entire shift or two to complete. Overhaul work would pull more people off for even longer periods of time -- it's not a trivial task to do a D check on a widebody plane taking everything apart and putting it back together.

Plus, 1500 total people does not mean they're all working all at the same time for every hour in the week. If each of them is working a 40 hour week and there are 168 hours in the week, then that's 23% of them working at any given time, or 381 mechanics available systemwide on an average basis. With the number of little things that have to be done to repair planes, that's not all that many. Including that these are also the ground crew that run the tugs and other ground equipment as well as the aircraft cleaners, that's really not many people left to fix anything. Marginally normal operations might be able to be maintained, but anything irregular will likely cause it to fall to pieces.

There aren't really any spare aircraft to put in service when something fails (see the 747-200 recently parked on 6L at GUM) and there aren't the maintenance resources to fix planes to prevent them from going out of service, so I think we're going to see targeted cancellations and the majority of service maintained at least for the first few days. Beyond that is anyone's guess, but the stock market seems to be hedging their bets.

Back in 2001 at the last contract agreement, there were 9,300 active members of AMFA for NW. Today less than half of those are left to go on strike because they were asked to reduce by yet another half. I see the ultimate target as pushing out the AMFA represented positions from the NWA company structure and outsourcing that to either one of the Airlink carriers or whatever external private company can do that as low-bid. Whether that's ultimately good or bad I'm not sure, but I think that having experienced, knowledgeable, and specialized employees within a company that are dedicated to the company doing well at all levels is generally (but not always) preferable to trying to work with an outside vendor.

As for pay, the approved 2001 contract is right on AMFA's site. Someone working 40 hours a week as a Technician would make $28/hr for $58,240/yr (slightly more for A&P licenses). While I don't know if there's been any change since then, the likelyhood it has increased is quite small and much more likely that it has since been cut. There's not really any bonus for seniority in the pay scale, so the technicians left that have 20 years' seniority are paid at that same rate. That's not all that much for the experience that these people have in doing the work and getting it done well compared to a number of other industries.