Carrier Contracted With Champion For Plane, Crew

As Northwest Airlines continues to suffer from financial ills and rocky labor relations, the tension at headquarters in Eagen, MN, is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Now, new trouble has arisen over the company's use of a Champion Air plane and crew on a flight from Detroit to DFW.

"The use of Champion Airlines to fly a very limited number of flights is part of our commitment to serve our customers," the Eagan-based airline said in a statement quoted by the St. Paul Pioneer-Press.

But Wednesday's flight has greatly upset union pilots, who say they have an exclusive arrangement with the airline -- they fly whatever NWA flies.

"We had a frank and candid discussion about this blatant violation of our contract," Mark McClain, head of the executive council of the Air Line Pilots Association at Northwest, told the Pioneer-Press. "I asked [Northwest CEO Doug Steenland] to cease and desist further action."

But that may not happen. Even though the ALPA has been one of the most forthcoming unions when NWA asked for pay and benefit concessions, the airline says it was perfectly within its rights to use Champion.

The charter service, based in Bloomington, MN, provides planes and crews to airlines that don't have the capacity to meet demand.

But Northwest's use of a Champion plane and crew only exacerbates ill will between management and labor. This, in the face of ongoing contract talks between the airline and its mechanics. Those talks are set to resume next week after a 30-day cooling-off period declared when the two sides reached an impasse.

Pilots have said they will continue to work -- even if the mechanics carry through on their threat to strike. But "Actions like this can stand in the way of any cooperative effort to come up with a long-term solution," McClain said.

One outside observer told the Pioneer-Press NWA may have shot itself in the foot by using the Champion plane and crew.

"While Northwest wants to make its strike contingency plan as effective as possible, it has to avoid alienating the pilots," said John Budd, a professor of human resources at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

FMI: www.northwest.com