In response to the announced Boston Crew domicile/base closure we have developed this website to encourage and facilitate those who have a vested interest in the US Airways flight operations at Logan Airport to take action to convince the current  management to reevaluate and not only keep the Boston base open but to expand the operation.  This includes, but is not limited to: pilots, flight attendants, gate  agents, mechanics, passengers, airport vendors, stock holders, family members, and community leaders.

Boston has been one of the cornerstones of this historic, legacy franchise. We have active crew members who have been based in Boston their entire careers, some more than 40 years of service having been hired by Mohawk or Allegheny Airlines.

This base closing is detrimental to the local economy. Employees who have been contributing to the economy by working, paying taxes and raising their families in the surrounding communities may very well find themselves on the receiving end of services such as unemployment, healthcare and other benefits and outreach programs. There is never a good time to be increasing the rolls of the unemployed and certainly not now with decades high unemployment.

Boston is the largest metropolitan city without an airline hub. There is an extremely large source of origination and destination traffic that travel to and from this international gateway airport. Passengers from all of the New England States come to Boston for the ease , convienience and choices provided here. Logan has recently undergone a massive infrastructure upgrade which has included : a new runway, new and upgraded terminals with modern food courts, shops and baggage handling facilities. Low cost public transportation with light rail service to downtown Boston as well as substantial scheduled bus service to all the major surrounding communities is readily available. Boston is a historic city attracting thousands of tourists annually in addition to being  well known for its’ world leading universities, hospitals,  high tech industry , financial institutions and championship sport franchises.

We are probably at the bottom of the current recessionary business cycle.  US Airways  should, we believe, maintain or increase the airlines presence at Logan to be in position to capture the inevitable additional passengers  and revenue as the economy rebounds. US Airways will be leaving “money on the table” by pulling out of the current point to point flying the passengers now enjoy. The airline has touted itself as a “hybrid” carrier; a combination of a legacy hub -and-spoke operation with substantial low cost point-to-point service. Passengers do not want to always be driven through Philadelphia, Phoenix and Charlotte when traveling to other well served popular destination cities.

Closing the Domicile will:  decrease the operational reliability of the airline by not having crews ready on reserve when there is bad weather . The summers bring thunderstorms, the winter snowstorms and the fall and spring bring low visability with fog, all cause a large ripple effect throughout  the northeast including Philadelphia and Washington DC, where the future Boston based flying  is proposed to being staffed.  Without pilots in the surrounding towns and flight attendants assigned to ”OPR” ( on premises  reserve) , there is little doubt that the airlines reliability will be substantially reduced. One of the company referenced cost savings in favor of closing the Boston domicile is a calculation called “meet guarantee”, or reserve utilization as a function of reserve guarantee hours paid versus reserve hours flown. While there may be some utility and relevance to such information, a similar calculation could be made for the cost of insurance premiums  compared to insurance claims paid. A more relevant comparison may be to uninsured losses, or in our case, late or cancelled flights of the  Shuttle and the entire Northeast Corridor if there are no reserves “in base” and the corresponding costs  to pay for crews to dead head with additional hotel overnights  and per diem expense. The companies’ assumptions of efficiencies produced by consolidating bases for increased reserve utilization is greatly offset by these factors.

The increased training costs of the Domicile closure is unique when contrasted to the recent LGA base displacement bid because of the fact that over 80% of the crews live in base. Many of the junior captains and senior first officers will elect to bid and be trained on wide body equipment which will create a much larger training “cascade “ than the company has forecast. The company has stated that they believe vast majority of the pilots will simply follow the time in a similar proportion to the block hours transferred to  other bases without generating additional  training events. By contrast , it is very evident to us, that the pilots would much prefer to fly as a block holding co-pilot on the wide-bodies  versus commuting to reserve.  As for the senior Captains and  F/O’s,  if they are forced to commute, it might as well be for a pay raise on the A-330 or B-767. As an example, a reserve captain from BOS bids to the right seat of the A-330 which causes the bottom f/o to displace to the B-767, who bumps the next guy to the A-320 who in turn pushes another to B-737 and then yet one more to E-190 which still leads to a vacancy for a reserve captians seat that the original pilot has vacated. In this example, six training events were required to displace just one pilot that company has actually considered a cost savings because they anticipated that he would  follow the time to CLT and would not have to pay for his CQT training hotel when it came time for his annual recurrent training events. The above example may be extreme, however, multiply the possible combinations with one hundred and forty-seven pilots, and be assured the cost is far and away greater than  the company has estimated in their analysis to justify the domicile closure.