86% (APA/SWAPA Communications, Andrea Hoover, Amy Robinson)

Today's SWAPA number is 86%. That's the percentage of pilots who open each email SWAPA sends out to the membership, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's a lot of data that we gather on the comm channels, and now's a good time to dive into those numbers and what they mean.

Today we're joined by American Airlines Captain Andrea Hoover, Communications chair at the Allied Pilots Association, along with our own Communications director, Amy Robinson, to compare some notes on comm data, talk about what's working, and what we can improve on in 2025.

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Transcript

ÍMatt McCants:

Today's SWAPA number is 86%. That's the percentage of pilots who open each email SWAPA sends out to the membership, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's a lot of data that we gather on the comm channels, and now's a good time to dive into those numbers and what they mean.

Tony Mulhare:

Today we're joined by American Airlines Captain Andrea Hoover, an O'Hare Base seven three captain and communications chair at the Allied Pilots Association, along with our own communications director, Amy Robinson, to compare some notes on comm data, talk about what's working, and what we can improve on in 2025.

I'm Tony Mulhare.

Matt McCants:

And I'm Matt McCants.

Tony Mulhare:

And here's our conversation with Andrea and Amy.

Matt McCants:

Okay. So for a podcast about communication, talking about metrics may seem kind of counterintuitive. Right? But nothing could be from the truth. We're able to track a lot of data here at SWAPA with all the information we put out, and that's one of the more objective ways of listening to the membership. And is that your process over at APA as well?

Andrea Hoover:

Absolutely. We make sure that we try to track, not only the metrics, but we also include the face to face, which requires us to write notes, physically write notes, and distribute them to the committees so that that way they're getting feedback that way as well.

Amy Robinson:

Do you do that with, like in the terminals? How do you take the notes for your individual touch points?

Andrea Hoover:

We do. We have a couple touch points. Big one right now is NCN, which is National Communications Network, which is a subcommittee of the communications committee. Our goal is to have 10% of the pilot group in that committee, which is roughly 1,600 pilots. Every month we hold Zoom meetings with subject matter experts where we can kind of give them behind the scenes baseball, if you will. This is what the scheduling committee is working on. Here's what our joint implementation committee is working on. Please provide feedback. Here's air traffic control and procedures. So we include all the heavy hitters of, if you will, the flavor of the month. What are our pilots concerned about? We provide that information to our NCN volunteers. So now they have the facts when they're flying the line. We try to dispel any mis-truths. We hold concourse conversations where we take our volunteers.

We're attempting to do 40 a year. We look up the banks of flight times so we know in the most amount of pilots will be in a terminal, and we hit every single domicile. We provide our volunteers there with talking points from the subject matter experts. So our pilots see [inaudible 00:02:39] and they go, oh, there's one of our NCN volunteers. I can go talk to them and get information, or I can provide them with feedback. So we have somebody there taking feedback. After that they type up all the notes. They send it to the negotiating committee and the board of directors and off to the next one.

Tony Mulhare:

So that sounds fairly similar to something we did during our strike authorization vote preparation process. We had something called leading edge where we would send out volunteers from the strike committee to talk about what the SAV was or what it meant and that kind of engagement. But you're doing that all the time and including in your time period between negotiations?

Andrea Hoover:

Yes. That's how we're trying to keep our pilots engaged. Right now times are good. We've done some polling through University of New Hampshire. We know only have about 87% of our pilots are happy. How do you keep a happy pilot group engaged? They want to go to the airport, fly the trip, and go home. So we have to meet them where they are. Let's make it easy for them to get the information out there. Breeds unity, that elusive term.

Amy Robinson:

I think that's probably a pretty equal standard for our pilots as well. I think that's across the board. You want to do your job and go. And I think sometimes it's hard to keep those people engaged when, that's a big question for us a lot is how do you keep them engaged during times of not negotiations or when people are not looking at everything you're doing. They're not in an SAV vote. So those are pretty evergreen topics for us, I believe, as well. And I think sometimes just having that data, you have polling, but then that's just a small sample or it's a stratified sample of your membership, but you're not necessarily getting those individual discussion points. That's kind of an interesting perspective that you're still doing the in-person discussions even around that.

Matt McCants:

Yeah. It's continuous data collection.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Andrea Hoover:

Constant. And it helps prepare the pilot group. I mean, we can be, as committees, extremely prepared going into section six. How do we prepare the pilots? Last thing we want to do is try to rally the troops at the last minute. They're going, wait a second, how did we know? We didn't hear anything. We didn't get any information.

Matt McCants:

How did we get here?

Andrea Hoover:

How did we get here? So we do. We're trying to engage them on their level and a lot of the time, the feedback that they provide, the suggestions that they provide are absolutely fantastic. It gives the negotiating committee more tools in their back pocket to use when they go and meet the company to have these discussions in section six.

Amy Robinson:

Do your pilots read your emails very often? Do you know that?

Andrea Hoover:

We used to track those metrics really diligently, and then as our pilot group got younger and younger, we started to realize that those numbers that we were tracking weren't really good. It's just like the FMS, bad information in, bad information out. So we're still getting clicks on the emails, but we've kind of adopted this buffet style way of producing the information to our pilots. So we use emails. We use social media. We use the Concourse Conversations, podcasts. We use the short videos. Our short videos are really, really well received with our pilot group. It's very digestible. We've broken down the contract. We've broken down our aeromedical department, our safety department, you name it.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah. We're doing something called Quick Turns, which we put out on both the website and on YouTube. What platform are you using for your short videos?

Andrea Hoover:

We put them on our website as well as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, I believe Blue Sky is another one we've used, anywhere where we think our pilots are going to be, we make sure we meet them there. We make it as easy and as palatable as possible. If they don't have the to go look up the information, they're probably not going to, so let's just deliver it to them.

Amy Robinson:

On your website, I assume they have to get behind a firewall to be able to access information?

Andrea Hoover:

Yes and no. So this is a twofold thing. We recognize that we do a really good job of talking to our pilots and we really talk over the spouses. So we have twofold on our website. Behind the firewall, our pilots get everything they need. In front of the firewall, for our spouses, we have things like emergency contact number, all of our social media information, information about our benefits, travel, kind of, you name it, all forward facing. Behind the firewall, they're just going to get more information.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah. That's really good to meet different people where they are, especially if there's a spouse with an emergency and can't reach their pilot because they're in the middle of a flight somewhere. That's great.

Amy Robinson:

I know you said you do have clicks on your emails, but do you find that they still do read emails or do you find that is a bit of a struggle to get information to them that they're actually paying attention there?

Andrea Hoover:

So we send out a weekly news digest, which is, it's just basically a mailer that's, or an email, excuse me, that it's just a big huge publication of a lot of different articles where everybody kind of compiles all the work and it goes out. And we do get a lot of traction on that. We get feedback directly from our pilots responding to the digest as well as making comments on social media.

Amy Robinson:

So it's almost like a little printed publication that goes out to everyone?

Andrea Hoover:

Well, it's not printed. It is digital. It is an email form.

Amy Robinson:

Okay.

Andrea Hoover:

But there's so much information in that every single week.

Amy Robinson:

Okay.

Matt McCants:

Yeah. It sounds very similar to Snapshot.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Tony Mulhare:

You guys do a monthly articles as well and kind of deeper dives into topics or situations there at APA versus a weekly summary?

Andrea Hoover:

We do. We cover the big important issues, things that are happening with government affairs, with aeromedical, internationally, domestically, and those will generally be standalone articles that we also are standalone posts on social media.

Matt McCants:

Let's steer back to some big picture numbers and kind of fine tune from there. And back to the email discussion, we mentioned that our open rate for emails of the roughly one email per day that we sent out over the course of 2024 was 86%. Now every business does this to some capacity, right, emails to their employees and their customers. Amy, how does that number compare to what we're seeing in the industry at large out there?

Amy Robinson:

So I don't have industry at large numbers, but I do have, we use something called Constant Contact, which is an email marketing system that is pretty well known. Almost everybody gets something from this email marketing company. It's a third party vendor that we use, and from them average is about 43% open rate. And so we're at 86%, which you can see is pretty well over the industry average, and that covers all industries, everything from marketing companies to airlines, etc. So it's a pretty well-known third party tool. So our open rate is pretty high comparatively. I think the big question for me is how much of that gets digested. Right? Because a big question for us is how many follow-ups do we get from that?

And so that's kind of a question of in hearing some of Andrea's statements of talking to people in person and things like that, that makes me wonder if there's not a better way to communicate more directly to get feedback on those things more quickly, more up to date. You know? Because it is one of those things that we do it, we have emails that go out weekly. We have emails that go out almost daily during negotiations, we had something going out. But then the question becomes how much can you get back from that? How much feedback can you get back from that? And what's the best way to engage with your pilots to find out, if that's really reaching or resonating with them?

Andrea Hoover:

We find that one of the mechanisms, one of the tools we have to gather feedback from our pilots is this, we call it a sound off, and our pilots can fill out a report and they type it. It's free range writing. And they send it to us and it goes to our national officers, our board of directors, and all of our committee chairs and the entire comm committee. And they will be able to fill out anything they want, whether it be good, bad, suggestions, things that they're frustrated with, things they'd like to see change. And that way it's targeted so every committee sees it. We're all on the same playing field, if you will. We know exactly where our pilots feel on so many issues.

Amy Robinson:

Do you have problems getting people to adopt those tools or those?

Andrea Hoover:

No.

Amy Robinson:

No?

Andrea Hoover:

Right now we're getting on average of about 20 sound offs a day. During section six, it's about 500 a day.

Amy Robinson:

Wow.

Matt McCants:

And where do you find this sound off interface? Is it...

Andrea Hoover:

Right on our app.

Matt McCants:

... just everywhere? On the app.

Andrea Hoover:

Yep.

Matt McCants:

Okay.

Andrea Hoover:

You can get it on the app. You can get it on our website. It is one click and you start typing, very easy to use.

Matt McCants:

And now your app has got a lot of use off it. Right? You have 16,000 pilots and you have a massive buy-in on the app. How did that come about? Because the app didn't always exist and perhaps didn't always have that kind of traffic, so what's kind of the life cycle of what your app's gone through so far?

Andrea Hoover:

So the app, fortunately we have some amazingly smart and talented guys who work behind the scenes who build this, and they truly listen to our membership and take their suggestions, and it's extremely user-friendly. It's everything from all your trip information where you can see the live process of boarding. You can see if you have jump seaters, if you have non-REVs to pay audit to commuter. I can take a look and see, oh, it's showing a flight on another carrier where there's four plus open seats. It's really user-friendly. We also have a function on the app where you can download all of the documents that we have so that you can access it when your phone is turned off.

Matt McCants:

Kind of like a library, an offline library.

Andrea Hoover:

Yes. And it's extremely simple to search, very, very good search functions on that. And we do, we have a tremendously high user rate. Almost 15,900 plus of our pilots are using our app right now.

Matt McCants:

Wow.

Tony Mulhare:

That's really impressive. Our app was recently refreshed and it's been out for just a few months. We don't have quite that adoption rate. We have a pretty decent download rate. Our most popular items on the app tend to be the scheduling analytics as guys are working on their schedules and some of the commuting stuff. What's the driver for your app? What's the most popular thing, you think, on there?

Andrea Hoover:

Oh gosh. There's so many. It just depends on what our pilots are looking for at the time. I would go ahead and I'd probably guess the most popular would be the trip information. It'll tell you everything from the hotel that you're going to, the transportation, if you're getting a crew meal, how many passengers. You could pull up the logbook on your phone and see what your airplane's looking like.

Tony Mulhare:

Now does that compete with a company app? We have a company app that does that here at Southwest. Does American have its own app that does that and your app is just a better version of that or is that something you guys created at APA?

Andrea Hoover:

So we created this at APA. The company app is how you would legally sign for the aircraft. That's how you officially get your information from the company so that they know you've seen the release and you signed it.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah. Right.

Andrea Hoover:

You signed for the logbook. You do that on the company app, but there's just so much information on the APA app that everybody uses it.

Matt McCants:

And it probably started slow and then you added more and more capabilities.

Andrea Hoover:

Yes.

Matt McCants:

What was that like trying to market, hey, we've got some initially cool stuff on here, we're going to add more. How did that go about?

Andrea Hoover:

So as things are added to the app, you'll see a little icon that says beta. So it's in beta testing. And they're gathering data and feedback from the pilots that are choosing to use that beta testing. So they're getting feedback constantly and able to make updates on daily basis.

Matt McCants:

Sounds pretty similar to how ours is going right now. We launched this initial massive refresh where it took months to revamp the user experience and the user interface, and now we're plugging and playing in which parts of the app are getting the most visits, the most uses. And it's what you probably would expect. It's mostly scheduling century things. But back to what you're talking about, we're trying to make it a one stop shop where you're meeting everyone where they are, but it sounds like it does take some time to gain traction, popularity, things like that.

Andrea Hoover:

It is. And as they add things, you know, of course pilots, we're so nosy. We get in there and one of the features that I think is cool is you can pull up a yearly map and it'll show you visually, we're pilots, we love, we're visual learners, and it'll show you every leg you took. And I think I'm working too much is what I gathered from that portion of the app.

Amy Robinson:

I saw some of those posted on social media.

Andrea Hoover:

Yes.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:13:53]

Amy Robinson:

Some of the year in review was those were kind of cool.

Tony Mulhare:

Quite a popular post...

Amy Robinson:

Yep. It was.

Tony Mulhare:

... at the end of the year.

Amy Robinson:

Yep.

Tony Mulhare:

Yep. Absolutely.

Matt McCants:

Now social is another topic here, and I know you've said that you've kind of gone, not necessarily away from email being the primary means of communication, but there has definitely been more participation in information consumption and engagement on social. And that probably didn't happen overnight either. Right?

Andrea Hoover:

No. It didn't. As we saw our pilots going to different social media platforms where there were groups of American Airlines pilots just like I'm sure there's Facebook posts or Facebook groups that are absolutely SWAPA pilots. How do we get these people? How do we engage them? So we have our own social media platforms, of course, and make the information shareable. We've also just recently hired a social media firm to help us with our social media content. We're in a unique situation just like you guys are. We're not necessarily going for the blue check on Instagram. We have a very targeted audience still. I would love to have a million followers, but does that really what we need? We need 16,000 followers and probably their spouses, and I'd appreciate management taking a look at what we're working on as well. That's what we did. We hired a company who was going to help us with our very specific targeted needs.

Tony Mulhare:

So one of the challenges of social media, especially the video stuff, is it's pretty short soundbites that you can put out on YouTube or on reels or on TikTok or whatever. But how do you take that and get, especially a younger person, maybe that's the kind of media they tend to consume, but you still need to point them to the source documentation to get them to really go deep dive into the finer points of scheduling or especially the contract. So how do you drive that message of, here's a quick soundbite, but we need you also to go then and really read the contract and get to know what's driving your daily quality of life.

Andrea Hoover:

So one of our top features is our contract minute and we have one of our contract compliance specialists, he goes into our studio and he breaks down the contract in very digestible moments. So he'll talk about here's our off schedule operations, our IROPS events, and then there'll be a link to our sequence protection flow chart. This is how you read the contract. This is how you follow the contract in one minute segments at a time. We do the same thing with our aeromedical and we do the same thing with scheduling. How do you understand the contract and use it? Here's someone telling you how to do it and it's one minute videos.

Tony Mulhare:

And we have something similar with the quick turn videos that we produce here with our contract admin specialist. But are you able to track your click through rate to see who's then taking that next step and clicking on those links to go find more information?

Andrea Hoover:

We can see how often the videos are viewed and we do have a high view rate. We don't know who's watching it. I mean, we can take a guess on 'cause it's on social media and then it's also on our website. But as far as solid numbers, no. During an IROPS event, those IROPS videos get watched at a higher rate than they would on a day like today where it's nice.

Amy Robinson:

You know, sometimes you can tell too with ours when there's a really steep drop off after like a minute and a half. You can see that they're viewing it for a minute and a half and then after a minute and a half, anything that we have over that, it just plummets. So you have much lower numbers on our videos for that. So I try to tell them it has to be two minutes or less because anything over that is just really not consumable in one quick setting.

Andrea Hoover:

Agreed.

Matt McCants:

We track all the impressions that are in social, that means just anybody basically looking at whatever the content is. It doesn't necessarily mean going deeper into it, although we can see that as well. And it points to another metric that's important, as pilot groups as a whole. And that's the demographic change that's in progress now. And I think you guys are a little bit younger than we are as a whole of your 16,000 pilots. Because you have so many flow through programs, you're seeing more and more younger pilots and younger people digest information in different ways. And I'm guessing that's probably another reason why the app has become more popular and social media has become more popular as far as a way to get the information. Would you agree?

Andrea Hoover:

I completely agree. We're in a situation right now, our seniority list is flopping. We were very, very senior. We have a tremendous amount of retirements and just like you said, with the flow throughs and the new hires, we have roughly 45 new hires a week. It's a lot. The changeover is quick. How do we get a hold of them day one when they're already drinking from a fire hose and then stay with them all the way through to retirement? You know, we are looking at people who are going to be here for 40 years.

Matt McCants:

And all that while maintaining contact with the generations that have been around in the company for 20, sometimes 30 years. Not every age group communicates and consumes information the same way. So you have to balance both those things. Yes?

Andrea Hoover:

Yes. Absolutely. And that's a tough one for us. We have four generations of pilots on property right now. So how do you reach everybody? Hence the buffet style of putting media...

Matt McCants:

Buffet style. Yes.

Andrea Hoover:

... out there.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Andrea Hoover:

It is.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Matt McCants:

I like that.

Andrea Hoover:

Just pick and choose because we've got the ones that are exclusively going to read the email. Thank you for reading the email. And then we've got the ones that are doing TikTok dances on the ramp. You know?

Amy Robinson:

Do you know what your breakdown is, your demographics for your ages?

Andrea Hoover:

I don't off the top of my head.

Amy Robinson:

Top. Okay.

Andrea Hoover:

Yeah.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah. I actually had to just pull ours. Ours are predominantly 50 to 59.

Tony Mulhare:

For now.

Amy Robinson:

For now.

Tony Mulhare:

[inaudible 00:19:01].

Amy Robinson:

But I'm just saying that's that's our snapshot right now.

Tony Mulhare:

Correct.

Amy Robinson:

But the lower end, I think, they probably have a lower demographic than us.

Matt McCants:

Yeah. We're looking at about 2,000 or so of the 11,000 plus that are under the age of 40. And then everything else is still above the age of 40. But again, we're not making more new pilots in those older age brackets.

Amy Robinson:

Right.

Matt McCants:

They're coming in the younger age bracket.

Amy Robinson:

Right.

Matt McCants:

So as such, we need to figure out ways to communicate the most effectively with the demographic groups as they escalate through the ranks of the airline.

Andrea Hoover:

Yeah. It is. I mean, we have about two pilots a day retiring, So as somebody who is not as senior as them, I really appreciate it. And the flip side is as the newer generation comes in, it's breathing life into the membership. And I'm sure you guys feel the same thing at SWAPA. There's excitement and we all went through this time where there wasn't any movement and now there is movement and it's fun to fly and fun to be with somebody sitting next to you who wants to be here, wants to learn. One of the things that we've talked about, and, Matt, you touched on this a little bit, unity, and we look at our pilot group and they've been so many places. They've all worn so many different wings, but right now we all get up in the morning, we put on the same set of wings. We go to the airport and do the same job.

You know, we walk through the airport and we do that sideways wave that we all do when we see another pilot. And how do we make sure that that relationship, whatever it is, continues to grow and is healthy, and how do we make sure that we're moving in the right direction towards an effort to be successful in section six and still recognize that we may not all agree on a lot of the different things, but that doesn't mean we can't have a healthy conversation and get it ourselves in a position where we're going to have more gains in the next round of contracts.

Tony Mulhare:

So let's talk about that for a second because we do have these new hires into both of our companies, and as we start these destination 225 for us and for your academic college to professional aviation programs and the flow throughs that go along with that, now we're getting a significant number of people that haven't been around through the torrid years of the airline. Some of these, you know, my new hire class was a lot of people that had been furloughed from two or three different companies on their way here, and they were all about the union. But now we have a lot of people who, A, don't know what a union is, and they're not really sure why it's important.

And so how do we then teach that history so that during section six you have a group that understands that what you have, the company just didn't give you. It was negotiated for and often hard fought. How do you go about that education process of, hey, we're glad you're here. We're glad you're excited to be at Southwest Airlines or American Airlines, but hey, welcome to your pilot union and here's what we do for you. How do you guys do that?

Andrea Hoover:

That's a really good question. We actually took a play out of your book. And we recognize how many touches you have to your new hires the first two weeks. You guys do a fantastic job. So we were like, God, we got to be better. How do we do this? Our membership committee has started, we do more touches with our new hires. I think there's four in the first two weeks. And we very specifically bring up the history of APA and the history of unions. We actually put out a suggested reading list because that's pretty important. I'm not sure how many people read. I love books. Maybe I'm just one of the few nerds that likes to flip through pages. But it's important to know like, hey, this is the history of your airline, of your union, of unions as a whole because collectively we've all made strides and where do we learn from each other? How do we work with each other, collaborate going forward? So we do. We talk to our new hires and we provide them with a brief history printed out of the history of APA.

Matt McCants:

You can certainly take this from our playbook. One thing that our membership is going to see this year is little snippets from flying the line, key dates in flying union history, and how this started, some of the major events and milestones that unions crossed, which passed this prologue. And if you don't understand the history of where you came from, you might end up repeating some of the mistakes of the past. And that's certainly something we want to avoid. But I think pilots generally do appreciate history and this is some very specific history that I hope they will glom onto, and that's another way of educating some of the folks who aren't as aware of where we come from, what some of those things were. And one of the other tough parts about communicating, even in peacetime is the occasional sensitive topic that comes up. Right? In the last 12 months, APA has had quite a few of those, an [inaudible 00:23:29] drive, the recalling of a president. So talk us through what that was like and how you communicated during these bad news times.

Andrea Hoover:

It has been tough. I kind of touched on it a little bit earlier, how we don't ever want any of our pilots to think that they're not being heard. So the card drive kicked off the day after we signed our contract, and then the next year it was a year of growth. I think the biggest takeaway is that we needed to take a hard look in the mirror and make some really positive changes, and that was kind of driven by the card drive. So the card drive has since failed.

They came out not too long ago and said that they didn't have enough cards and the card drive in the state that it was, in my opinion, was what APA needed to make the changes, to grow and be better and hold ourselves accountable and say, okay, these guys might be onto something. We can make changes that need to be changed. And we did. We've been able to now refocus, re-steer the ship, looking forward to section six in 18 months, say, okay, we're all back and now as opposed to having arguments, we can have disagreements in that there's a big difference. Like the nuances in those two words as opposed to fighting, let's have constructive conversations.

Matt McCants:

Healthy disagreements are good.

Andrea Hoover:

Healthy disagreements. Exactly. And then as far as when our president was recalled, that was done by the board of directors in open session and we've been pretty open with our pilots, hey, this is what happened. Log on to AlliedPilots.org. Go watch the video. That way they can see it firsthand as opposed to getting any of our ideas put in their head. That way they can see this was the discussion, here was the debate, and here's why it happened.

Amy Robinson:

So you published the entire discussion of the session and how and why it happened?

Andrea Hoover:

The video was posted. Yes.

Amy Robinson:

Wow. Okay.

Andrea Hoover:

Yes.

Amy Robinson:

That's very transparent. I like that.

Andrea Hoover:

You know, we've been hearing that word a lot, transparency, and it's kind of this, we don't want our pilots to think anything's happening behind the scenes in secret 'cause that's really not, doesn't do anybody any good. We're actually starting to record a bunch of short videos of behind the scenes at APA. This is what this building looks like. Sure. Our pilots come in on new hire dinner and captain upgrade dinner and they see the building, but what does that, they're in there five minutes.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Andrea Hoover:

Then they still wouldn't have dinner. So we want to show them, there's a lot of really amazing volunteers behind the scenes doing tremendous amount of work on their behalf, and it's our responsibility to make sure that they're aware of it. So how do we communicate it? Short videos again.

Matt McCants:

Well, that's how Tony kind of got started here. He was a volunteer that was in strike and then got even more involved. And so Tony's had this perspective of seeing the negative energy that can turn into unity. So what's that been trying to mold negative energy and use that as our unifying force. And now we're on the flip side of that.

Tony Mulhare:

I think anytime you're in negotiations, you have a natural unity amongst the pilots. 'Cause you have something that everyone is so focused on that's so important to the next four, eight to sometimes 10 or even 12 years of their career as these negotiations tend to drag on. And so there's that shared angst and it's a unifying thing, but that part isn't super sustainable throughout the periods where you're not in negotiations for those three to four years. But you also have to be, like you guys are out there talking to people in your terminal engagements, I think is what you call them, but you have to be preparing the groundwork for that next leg, that next segment of contract negotiations. We do a survey, educating polling.

I'm sure you guys have something fairly similar to that. And then you have those one-offs. Like we had just had the Elliott Investor Management, had a lot of people's attention. There were some questions concerning what was going on. There's always the rumor mill about potential mergers or acquisitions. What do you guys do on those reactive comm situations where something comes up out of the ordinary? How do you try to address those things with your pilots while protecting the board's ability to discuss in private, but like you were just talking about the transparency of here's what your union is working on for you and to try to quell the rumor mill with your pilot group.

Andrea Hoover:

It's kind of a double edged sword, and I'm sure you guys do the same thing. You know, when something goes wrong when you're flying and you talk about making a PA to the passengers, you got to be truthful. You don't want to give them too much information because that's going to stir the masses. That's the last thing you want to do. But addressing something upfront saying, we're aware of this situation, just know your volunteers are working on it behind the scenes. We'll give you an update and then give them the time you're going to give them. You know, we'll give you an update tomorrow. That's holding yourself accountable.

The membership goes, we'll hear something tomorrow. Again, using our NCN, our National Communications Network, they've paired up with negotiating committee. So negotiating committee is giving them very targeted questions to ask in the terminal. So when they go out to the terminals, now they're having targeted questions from negotiating committee. They're getting the updated. As soon as there's breaking news, our NCN is made aware so they at least have some information, whereas if they don't know the answer, they at least know, hey, this is the committee you need to call.

Matt McCants:

Okay. A lot of common standards and practices here. A lot of data gathered. I'd say something you guys are doing right now that perhaps we're not, and maybe we need to piggyback on that is that in person touch point to see what information we can glean from that outside of all the ones and zeros that we're able to gather through social, through email, all the other various electronic means and some good contingency planning shared practices here. Back to Tony's point, you know, the negative stuff is easy to rally around, especially when you're awaiting a contract that you've been fighting hard for, in both of our cases, years during section six. Another thing that I think pilots maybe don't get themselves enough credit for is just how great some of the things they do in the cockpit, outside the cockpit, cherry work, just really selfless acts. And we've got several of those that's going to be an emphasis point this year at SWAPA, and I hope you join us on that.

And that's highlighting what the membership is doing that is not only great professional work, but great public work. We just had a podcast where one of our retired pilots discussed his journey as an aerobatic and race champion. And we've got several pilots still in the seniority list that we're highlighting this year. Some of them coming from very, very humble backgrounds and making it to the top of this profession. We have firefighters that have been literally pulled out of captain upgrade class to go fight fires in California, a multitude of them. And we're going to make sure that we provide the public a lens into what that was like, and some of these great things that pilots do. And that also goes along with the history of aviation and the history of our unionism and activism is that it's more than just a job. This is a profession. It is something that we preach to Capitol Hill. It's something that we preach to Wall Street. And I think the more buy in we have of this being a profession than just a job, the better we're going to do.

Amy Robinson:

Well, I think one of the other things too is, we've talked about this a little bit, but it gets lost a lot. But pilots are, by far, some of the most generous people I've ever met in my life in terms of willingness to give to charity to someone they find a need. I mean, I recall back when we had the hurricanes in Houston, we had a bunch of pilots load up trailers and drive down there to help bring people back. And just things that you would never expect, that the generosity of spirit is incredible in the pilot group alone.

Andrea Hoover:

And you look at just times like the holidays, like pilots or post. If anybody has an overnight in...

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Andrea Hoover:

... San Francisco...

Amy Robinson:

Come to my house.

Andrea Hoover:

... I'll pick you up. They don't even know them...

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Andrea Hoover:

... which is, yeah.

Matt McCants:

Yeah. We love to give each other a hard time, but we love to pick each other up just as much.

Amy Robinson:

Yeah.

Andrea Hoover:

Yep.

Amy Robinson:

It's pretty incredible. So when he talks about highlighting that, to me, that's something that doesn't get to the public eye very often. Right?

Andrea Hoover:

No. It really doesn't.

Amy Robinson:

And I think that's an important thing for, that's not just an internal message, that's an external message as well.

Andrea Hoover:

I think there's a lot of pride when we go to work. You know, we're all alpha types personalities, but there's something special about when you have a kid that wants to come up and see the pilots, and there's still something magical about this, and I hope that nobody forgets that this is, it is a profession. It's a fantastic career to have. It's something to be proud of. We all look forward to that water cannon at the end of our career. And there's so many pilots that don't want to leave because it is just like you said, it's a profession to be proud of.

Tony Mulhare:

We'd like to thank Andrea for her time today and the work we've done together with APA over the years. Pilots from both of these independent unions have stood together and will continue to do so as we advance the profession in the future.

Matt McCants:

Today's bonus number is 27,518. That's the combined number of SWAPA and APA pilots spread across four generations in age. Our charge is to inform, educate, and unify all of those pilots across our two airlines, meeting them where they are and how they consume information. Each of those pilots has a unique story about where they came from and what they're doing that makes this profession so great. If you know one that is worth sharing with the membership, please reach out to comm@swapa.org, because we'd love to get in touch with them and spread the word.