[QUOTE=Threy]Very bad luck or a business plan that was not working after deregulation and for some time even before that period...

The problem is that all legacy carriers in the US somehow failed after deregulation and lost more money than they earned.
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An acquaintance who has done legal work for various airlines insists that the reason the majors are in trouble is that they outsmarted themselves by going deeply into debt to acquire competitors during the free-wheeling '80s. The reason they have been unable to break even with full planes, even before the rise in oil prices, is their tremendous debt burden, according to this source.

Yet NW is expecting the employees to make all the sacrifices to atone for the executives' mismanagement while the executives themselves continue to pocket huge bonuses (for what?). They also want to monopolize the Humphrey Terminal at MSP and kick all the other airlines over to the charter terminal while asking the state of Minnesota to subsidize the remodeling of the airport.

Sentiment among us ordinary people in the Twin Cities is on the side of the mechanics, and we wonder why management didn't make a good faith offer to cut their own compensation (as Lee Iaccoca did when he took over Chrysler) when negotiating with them.

(My source says that NW management wants to go into bankruptcy, which will allow them to scrap the rank and file employees' pension plan--not the executives' pension plan, of course--and otherwise balance the budget on the backs of the people who do the actual work.)