Greetings,

Bid Deadline for Extended Leaves and Voluntary Furlough is Thursday July 9th!!

Crew Planning hopes to award as many as 295 elective leaves effective September 2009.  There are varying durations and types that are outlined in  bulletin 2009-0197 and in the conference in First Class/World of Inflight/Extended Leaves and Voluntary Furloughs.

AFA has been asked to pinpoint the "danger zone" for folks; unfortunately it really is a moving target.  On June 9th the number given AFA as the number of active Flight Attendants management needed to reduce for the Fall schedule and up to 18 months following was 240. In a subsequent meeting it was quantified as 240 to 280.  The June 17th bulletin referenced "approximately" 295.  Part of the vagary of the target number is what the total number of Flight Attendants projected to be active on September 1st will be.  So...one might look at the seniority list and count up 240 to 295 in system seniority...but that would be very misleading. More accurate would be to count up only the active Flight Attendants (using the bidding number).  The "active only" approach (of course that is using the July active) hits a system seniority range of 2471 to 2399 - which falls from within the class of April 2007 to within class of November 2006.  That is all BEFORE any ELOA, VF or additional LOA types are accounted for, so clearly a worst-case scenario!

Currently Crew Planning has fewer than 75 total requests for the 3 types of leave and some of those are from Flight Attendants that are already inactive.  If your personal situation allows you to consider one of the elective leave programs please do look over the information in First Class.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kelle Wells
MEC President
July 3, 2009