Kurt Heidemann:

Today's SWAPA number is 45. That's the number of years since the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association was formally recognized by the National Labor Relations Board on March 27th, 1978. You've heard the expression that history repeats itself. So for this SWAPA anniversary, we wanted to look back at some of the events that have happened in our union and see what they tell us about what we're experiencing here today in 2023.

Amy Robinson:

So at today's show, we're talking to-

Kurt Heidemann:

Amy, are you sick?

Amy Robinson:

Yeah, a little bit.

Kurt Heidemann:

Yeah, you sound pretty terrible. Let me do this. So on today's show, we're talking with Phoenix Captain Frank Schmuck, who's been with Southwest since 1994. About four years ago he started the Southwest Pilot's Then and Now Facebook group with a tagline of "A bridge to the future by way of the past." More active than ever, this group has become sort of a historical, cultural, and informational page related to many aspects of our pilot's lives.

Amy Robinson:

I'm Amy Robinson.

Kurt Heidemann:

And I'm Kurt Heidemann. And here's our interview with Frank.

Amy Robinson:

So Frank, tell us a little bit about Southwest Pilots Then and Now and how it got started and why.

Frank Schmuck:

Well, Amy, first of all, I just want to thank you and Kurt for having me on. I know I echo the sentiments of all the pilots here at Southwest as we fly throughout the system for the great work that both of you two do along with your team. But Southwest Pilots Then and Now, got started in August of 2019 while I was recovering from knee surgery. I just wanted to clean up a digital log book I had written and kept since before starting with Southwest in 1994. And to do that, I was trying to get a current list of all our pilots present and past. I had some in my digital logbook, but it wasn't complete. So I thought if I could get one, I could make it available to our pilots and more and using who might be using digital logbooks and then do an easy lookup of employee number, would give someone the name of who they were flying with, et cetera.

Well, we have an active seniority list on CWA, but once a pilot leaves or retires, well their name just goes off into bit heaven, if you will. And so I called Rod Jones, who was serving then as the vice president of SAGE, which is an acronym for Southwest Airlines Golden Eagles, that's our retired pilot group. And Rod said that they had about 700 pilots, retired pilots in their group, but my records showed they should have had twice that number. So overnight I thought maybe we could build a Facebook group and collectively work to rebuild that list. We did. We called it Southwest Pilots Then and Now, and it's the only group of airline pilots in the world that we know of that has active, retired and pilots that went other directions.

Kurt Heidemann:

Can all SWAPA pilots join your group and how do they do that?

Frank Schmuck:

Absolutely. The common denominator is anyone who at any given time was on at least one Southwest Airlines pilot seniority list. So anyone can join. We're kind of strict about, it has to be the pilot, no spousal accounts, no fictitious names. We want people to be able to be open and share information with one another in the group. So we built this thing over four years now, and for the 50th anniversary of Southwest Airlines, we put out what we call the master seniority list, which is everyone ever hired by Southwest Airlines as a pilot. And we keep doing it every year or have been for the last two or three years now, or excuse me, two years. This will be, I guess our third one coming up in June.

Kurt Heidemann:

And so by joining Southwest Pilots Then and Now a pilot can get access to that list?

Frank Schmuck:

Yes, absolutely. And we use a company called [inaudible 00:04:00], and we do it for a couple reasons. I had long discussions with SWAPA and the airlines about how we might do this because many of you know there's birthdates on the active seniority list. So we decided, well, we can't really put that out. We wanted to make sure that no one's identity would be stolen if the list got in the wrong hands. So [inaudible 00:04:18] does something very special for us, and we help them do that. We just put out the age of the person. If they happen to be deceased, we have that, then it's their age at passing. But then each person who downloads, they get two downloaded attempts, that that's used to try to prevent hacking, but their name and employee number or their name and email I think it is put on that list, which is digital. It can't be printed. It's only saved on. And so we know who that came from, that list if it ever got out in someone else's hands.

Kurt Heidemann:

So how many pilots has Southwest ever hired? How long is that list as of today?

Frank Schmuck:

That list is 14,274 pilots ever hired by Southwest Airlines.

Kurt Heidemann:

And so two thirds of them are still employed with us today.

Frank Schmuck:

Correct. Over 10,435, yesterday, were on the active list. I've broken out some numbers for you and can share them with you if you'd like.

Kurt Heidemann:

Sure.

Frank Schmuck:

I mentioned we have 14,274 pilots who've ever been hired. 10,435 are on the active list. Of those we know, 337 are deceased, 602 have left for other ventures. That's a pretty big number if you think about it. But that's since 1971. And of course we had 632 leave on the VSP, which was the voluntary separation program due to COVID. And then 2,174 are now retired, meaning their age 65 and older and not VSPs. Our oldest living pilot from that list today is 90 years of age. And the average age of a new hire all time is 38.35 years of age. The average age of pilots working today is 53. And the overall average age, when you include the retireds and everyone else, it's about 54. So that gives you an idea the demographics of our pilots based on age and numbers.

Amy Robinson:

Does the Southwest Pilots Then and Now do anything other than just the Facebook group?

Frank Schmuck:

Well, the Facebook group exists as a way for us to communicate daily, but we do many more things. Right after I started the group back in 2019, I received a telephone call from Captain Mike Morrisey. Mike, as you know, was very active in SWAPA and he indicated he wanted to help with this, and I asked what he had in mind, and he told me that he does a lot of genealogy work. And I said, well, just a few days earlier, Captain Fred Hines had asked me if we could include rest in peace date on this list we were creating so they would know if someone had passed or not. And I said to Mike, I said, would you want to help us build that list? And he says, I'll take it a step further. We can build a virtual cemetery. And so he did. We have a virtual cemetery, which is basically if we have a picture on the pilot, it has where they might be buried, their obituary about them pictures. So it's really a nice place to collectively bring all those that have passed into one place. You can see whoever worked for Southwest that's passed.

Kurt Heidemann:

That's a very SWAPA kind of thing to have the data and get it all kind of collected and put together and all those numbers that you were quoting. I thought that's pretty fascinating actually.

Frank Schmuck:

Yes, it is. And one of the things that, particularly from the guys that started in 1971 and were here for the first 10 years, said, hey, how come Captain Ogden is not who was our first chief pilot, our first director of flight, and then ultimately a VP of flight operations said, how come he's not in there? And I said, well, he was never on a Southwest Airlines pilot seniority list. So that basically started, what we ended up doing in preparation for the 50th anniversary was writing stories, one a month, some of them longer than shorter than others, but about what it is to be a Southwest Airlines pilot from our seniority list to our training, to our uniforms, to our union, or SWAPA, to one of their stories we wrote, which is about the time, talents and treasures of love, which we looked at as many from flight deck stories that we learned and word of mouth, pilots here at Southwest Airlines who were paid to do something outside of flying.

And that's another piece of data Kurt, for you that might be of interest to you. We have 8 aerobatic champions, 5 astronauts, 20 software developers. That's a topic for today, 7 PhDs, 5 medical doctors. We actually had a gynecologist here who would deliver babies during the week and fly on the weekends. 4 certified financial planners, 2 CPAs, 7 lawyers, 1 professional athlete who played for the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Diego Chargers at the time. 5 generals are admirals and 5 POWs, and the list goes on. I mean, there's just, we have quite an immense amount of talent among this group that's beyond just flying airplanes. And so we did even a couple more stories where we did our charity, what we've done to help throughout the years with the start of the Ronald McDonald House Charities, and I think it's 17 other charities that have been started by pilots more than one pilot here at Southwest Airlines. And then lastly, kind of finished with the legacy piece, which was called All in the Family, which was I think about 120 or so families that are blood relative pilots. So we really explored the gamut of who we are as pilots at Southwest, and I think it brought us all together in preparation for the 50th anniversary of Southwest.

Kurt Heidemann:

So Frank, if we have about 14,000 pilots ever at Southwest, about how many do you have in your group now?

Frank Schmuck:

Over 4,300 I think it is, are actively on Facebook and in this group now.

Kurt Heidemann:

And if they want to join, how do they find you? Or how can they join?

Frank Schmuck:

They could just go to Facebook and go to groups and search Southwest Pilots Then and Now, they send a request. We ask for one thing, and that's your employee number, and do you agree to the rules? Then we make sure that it is the individual before we allow them to come into the group.

Kurt Heidemann:

So Frank, what if a pilot's like me and doesn't even have a Facebook account for themselves? What can they join anyway?

Frank Schmuck:

Yeah. We have an email list where we send out stuff. It used to be once a month on historical things or things related to us as pilots that we felt were important, much like this tribalism speech coming up. And they at least get some contact from us that way and know about it. But I will tell you this, Kurt, we've had a lot of pilots reach out to us and they've joined Facebook just for this. They don't use it for anything else, but just to stay in touch with Southwest Pilots Then and Now because there's mentorship in there. We have three digit employee numbers in there. We have former presidents of SWAPA, former VPs of flight ops, chief pilots, check airmen, union reps. We're all there together. It's no different than you and I jumping in a jet, going flying together and having discussion at altitude.

Amy Robinson:

So you have a lot of historical context, but only about 1600 of the current pilots worked for Herb when he was CEO. And a lot has changed since then. How do you feel like history might help SWAPA and Southwest?

Frank Schmuck:

Well, that's a great question, Amy. I tell you what, I think history does have a way of repeating itself. And in addition to that, I mean, there's a famous quote out there, those who failed to learn history are doomed to repeat it. But Herb Kelleher, as many of us know, was an avid reader and he was a student of history, and possibly that might be why he was such a great leader. But if history does repeat itself, and I think it does, we might very well be in a period of replication that Southwest went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Kurt Heidemann:

Frank, what do you mean by that?

Frank Schmuck:

What I mean by that is our very first CEO of Southwest Airlines was a man by the name of Lamar Muse. And Lamar by Trade was an accountant, and he became a corporate finance officer of an airline and later became the Southwest Airlines first CEO. And I think that that right there kind of has some similarities with our recently past CEO. But Lamar had kind of an interesting relationship with the pilots of Southwest. At the time, we didn't have SWAPA, we had a crew council or a pilot council, and Lamar pretty much set the tone. I have a memo from 1975 where he's reaching out to the pilots because he thinks it's getting too large and too busy. And he uses these words, he says, as to our lower seniority pilots, I just cannot, for the life of me get too exercised about their plight, which kind of shocks me. It's like the relationship wasn't very strong or good between the pilots and the CEO Lamar Muse at the time, which I think replicated itself later in our previous CEO.

Kurt Heidemann:

Yeah. I would argue that that's a little bit like calling pilots plumbers.

Frank Schmuck:

Exactly. And so when that happens, then it's difficult to keep things, the company working together along with the pilots. And I think it replicated itself again after Herb had stepped down when we had a CEO for a very short time, and it wasn't the pilot's fault, but after negotiations fell apart, we had the CEO step down, and that brought us Gary Kelly at the time.

Amy Robinson:

I did read in this month's RP that you interviewed Gene.

Frank Schmuck:

Well, I interviewed Gene Van Overschelde, who was just a wealth of information. He's probably the only pilot at Southwest that was ever technically a president of SWAPA. It was the crew council at the time. But he's the one that really wrote the first constitution and called it Southwest Airlines Pilots Association. He was a check airman and he was also a chief pilot. So I'd interviewed him about the early days of SWAPA, and as you know, we're coming up on 45 years this month as an organization officially. And so Gene was very instrumental in the early days because he was young. Many of the pilots that were hired came from Purdue, and several of them were getting close to retirement age. But Gene and a few others, only two actually of those original 23 retired from Southwest that are still living, excuse me, let me be clear about that. Two are still living today. They're Bob Pratt and Gene Van Overschelde.

To do the Don Ogden interview was much more difficult. I had to reach out to family and friends and people that knew him. And as you know, if it's not on paper, then you sometimes take in a lot of different input and you've got to try to find where the truth is. And so that was a very interesting story of how back in 1971, Captain Ogden really launched this thing, many who don't know, but his birthday was February 14th and he turned 60 in 1971. So he was a chief pilot and check airman at American who came over to set the ground, ground rules and stage, he set us up as an operations, flight at Southwest Airlines. And he wrote many of the put together, should I say, and wrote some of the operations manuals of which there's a section still in our ops manuals today called Professionalism versus Foolish Pride. And over 50 years have passed since he wrote those words, and they still apply today.

Amy Robinson:

So Frank, tell us, how does that history that's available on the Southwest Pilot Center now help our pilots when it comes to negotiations?

Frank Schmuck:

Well, that's another great question, Amy. I think looking back on our history, we get to learn some of the things that have happened. I'm going to take a step to the right here and use retirement as one aspect of negotiations. I was doing a little research the other day and I wanted to just share with you all that the very first retirement that Southwest Airlines offered to all their employees and the pilots was the profit sharing plan. And that occurred on January 1, 1973, but it wasn't until 1986 that Steve Palmason, Don Bral, Frank Wright, Ken Gole, Dave Fister, John Norton, several pilots came together and as part of that contract established the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association 401k. They presented it to Herb Kelleher who was CEO, President at the time. And he says, well, if you guys want to manage this, you're going to have to do it yourself.

And so we did, and look what we have today. We have, as pilots have done some great things, and the SWAPA 401K is one of those things. By 1994, we had the stock options, which there's good and bad to that we can talk about, but in 1999, the pilots said, we need more. And we created the top hat and the 415 excess plan. And just a few short years, five years after that, we created the 401a17 excess plan. So it's been about, I don't know, 15, 16 years since we've done anything with retirement. And it's encouraging to see what the negotiating committee is attempting to do with the cash balance plan that they're trying to work through and some of the communication that we're seeing. So I think history does show us how we can be leaders and we can create innovative and new things in a contract.

Amy Robinson:

You also interview all of the pilots who have left Southwest Airlines. Can you give us a little of your data on that?

Frank Schmuck:

Yeah, certainly I can. I didn't put a whole lot together for today, but I started as a fluke. I was writing stories about other airlines and pilots that may have come from those airlines, and low and behold, so I was doing a story on FedEx and I thought, well, if I'm going to ask these people that we saw on the list had left, actually, we were asking their classmates, their new hire classmates, Hey, where'd this person go? It just so happened to be at about a time a year or so ago, and SWAPA said, "Hey, what are you doing with this? Can you help us with it?" And I said, "Absolutely, I'd love to help you and let's find out what happened to these and where they're going."

So we ended up working together with SWAPA Southwest Pilots Then and Now did. And we reach out to the pilots to try to find out, "Hey, where did you leave? Where are you going? Tell us what you want to tell us." And it's quite interesting. One of the things we found for a lot of people, I just received a couple today, was that many of the pilots are leaving because they're tired of commuting. They just don't want to drive the distance or fly the extra flight, and they think maybe going here would be a better way. Now that's a two edged sword, so they're leaving, but in the same sense, we didn't have enough here to keep them here. So I do think SWAPA is doing the right thing in sharing all these pilots that are leaving. And the sooner that we can get a contract that's industry leading, I think is going to be very good for the pilots.

Kurt Heidemann:

I don't want to put on my negotiating hat here, but I will say I think that your point about commuting is it is definitely getting worse than it ever has been. And I think that's something that's hard to communicate to the company. They say, "Oh, we've always had commuters that it's a choice." We don't agree with that, but that's the position. When you were here at the beginning, 50% load factors, you could get on a flight every 15 minutes from Dallas to Houston. A commuter could do that, but now with 85% load factors and less than half a dozen flights a day, it certainly gets to be a tougher road to hoe.

Frank Schmuck:

Absolutely. And with Delta's last year, changing their positive space for commuters, that's made it even harder for commuters today because many of our pilots do commute. Even though they're online, they sometimes use the offline commute in their city to get to and from work. So we can learn a lot from other airlines and history both.

Kurt Heidemann:

Absolutely. One other question I had, when you're talking about the folks that have left earlier, you were talking about over the life of Southwest Pilots, how many pilots have left early, did you say, or left?

Frank Schmuck:

Well, 602 pilots since 1971 have left the airline, meaning they did not retire. We don't distinguish on how, why or where, or should I say how or why they just left and we consider them part of us. So that is, if you take 602 out of 14,000, that's an interesting number. But we've had 100 of those 600 happen in the last what year? A little over a year.

Kurt Heidemann:

Yeah. That's what I was going to ask you about, or at least mention is I'm looking at it, today's email going out from SWAPA and it says 101 pilots have left since December of 2021. So 100 in the last, what, 16 months?

Frank Schmuck:

100 in the last 16 months and 600 in the last 52 years. So that just tells you that if you were to graph the trend that's happening, it's not a positive trend for wanting to make us a destination airline for the pilot.

Amy Robinson:

So we talked earlier this month is SWAPA is 45th anniversary, but I'd like to go back and talk about Southwest is 50+ now. So who represented the pilots before SWAPA?

Frank Schmuck:

That's interesting. Before SWAPA was formed, from what I gathered in the research and the writings that we put out was there was a crew council or a pilot council. Of the 23 pilots that were hired originally in 1971, a majority of them came from Purdue Airlines, and that's how they operated. So Jim Everett was the one who initially led this crew council, and he would be the one who would talk to Captain Ogden. And Captain Ogden would talk with Lamar Muse, or the three of them would talk Gene Van Overschelde was the assistant, they didn't call him a vice president, but he was an assistant to Captain Everett, and he's the one that created the first constitution. And then that constitution kind of existed and the pilots, by 1974, it was written, 1975, it started to take place. And then Gene was serving as the president at the time and then turned it over to Sam Cohen.

And that's when Formalization really started, was under Sam in 1978, I think it was March 6th to be exact, that a petition had gone out for one week. So from March 6th to March 13th, and there was 112 pilots on the seniority list that included Rollin King, who was founder of the airline with Herb and all but one of those pilots signed that position to formalize. And so they had sent off to the National Labor Relations Board, a request to formalize and a hearing was set for March 31st, and by March 27th of 1978, so this coming March 27th will be the 45th anniversary of Southwest Airlines when they recognize SWAPA as the collective bargaining agent for the pilots of Southwest.

Amy Robinson:

Based on your historical knowledge. I just had a really quick question. Is Carl Kuwitzky the only SWAPA president to negotiate against the pilot group?

Frank Schmuck:

In this capacity? Yes. For a long time, Southwest Airlines, right up until Herb left, I think we had 23 vice presidents at Southwest Airlines. Today we have over 63. Well, what happened in those 20 some years? Did we buy a hotel business? Are we renting cars? No, we're still flying airplanes. So we've seen what's called corporate bloat go from 23 departments, if you will, to now 63 departments. So in the past, we didn't have a VP of Labor Relations or a Director of Labor Relations and all this that we currently have. So for history's sake, Carl Kuwitzky's position is one and only.

Now, there are some in the past where sometimes some presidents may have been accused of having to do certain things, but again, the pilots of Southwest had close working relationships with Herb and Steve Palmason, who is right now many know is fighting cancer, was probably one of the biggest pilot advocates yet had a very good working relationship with Herb. He could sit down with him, they could duke it out, and then they would go have drinks afterwards, and they had a contract. It was amazing. Today, I don't understand why there has to be so much infighting between the two, the pilots and the company. We should all be working together to try to solve something. And when Casey Murray put out Vision 2020, the company should have been more receptive, in my opinion, to what they had done than what we're reading in all the reports we get from both the negotiating committee and labor relations.

Amy Robinson:

So Frank, you've been here for a long time. What's your take on the current tensions between Southwest Airlines and SWAPA?

Frank Schmuck:

I'll tell you what, this month is not only the 45th anniversary, of SWAPA but it is the 25th anniversary of the 1998 message to the field, which normally wouldn't be recognized as something special. But except Herb delivered his remarks in what is now known as the famous tribalism speech. And in it, Herb defined tribalism it, he said, it occurs when any subgroup of people thinks of themselves as a detached island, separate from all the other groups, so that they start to believe that the customs, the ideas and the attitudes of their subgroup are superior and equivalent, perhaps of the immutable unchangeable laws of nature. And thus, this tribalism speech became something very iconic in the history of Southwest Airlines, and I think it's applicable here today for us to revisit it because Herb took the time and he had an amazing relationship with our pilots.

I mean, he had an open door policy. Herb would be out there in the system, not so much to be noticed so that he had a feel for what was happening with his people and his customers. And he talked about, I think, eight different tribalistic things that can happen, using different examples and how we can prevent it. And it's kind of like a football team. I mean, if a football team is playing for a championship game or even in the regular season and someone fumbles the ball, just because you're an offensive lineman, doesn't mean you don't pick it up because it's not part of your job description. You pick it up. We help one another. We work together as a team, and I think the tensions just exacerbate, if you will, the problems that we can see here at Southwest. And I think some of the ways to fix it is to be serious about getting back to negotiations, get on the table and try to solve those problems so we can move forward and all be rowing in the same direction.

Kurt Heidemann:

Thank you to Frank for talking with us today. If you're interested in joining Southwest Pilots Then and Now, you can send him a private message on Facebook and he can get you connected.

Amy Robinson:

As always, we want to hear from you. If you have any feedback for us or any subject matter experts you'd like to hear from, please drop us a line at comm@swapa.org.

Kurt Heidemann:

And finally, today's bonus number is 14,274. That's the total number of pilots who have been hired by Southwest Airlines since 1971. All of us here today share a bond with those who came before us, as well as those who will follow. It's something we need to keep in mind as we navigate our current environment and we work toward a better contract in support of our profession.