Although in bankruptcy, everything's fair game, and United's retire pilots are worried they'll be plundered by more-current and better-connected creditors.

The pilots' pensions represent unsecured debts of the company; they are not independently insured. That means those pensions, like all the other prepetition debts of the airline that was #1 in the world during most all of their flying days, are subject to being 'forgiven' by the Bankruptcy Court.

Retired pilots, the Court may reason, aren't as 'important' economically, as they can't show, as most suppliers can, that they routinely employ others. Each retired pilot is just one vote; a creditor-company could be hundreds, or thousands. Judges look at that, as they decide who's going to get what, in a bankruptcy reorganization such as UAL faces.

It's a bitter disappointment to lose such a lifelong investment, and the pilots have formed a committee, headed by two former top dogs of the pilots' union, Frederick C. "Rick" Dubinsky and Roger Hall. The two presented their concerns to the judge in court, this week.

Also at stake, and even likelier to be lost, are the retired pilots' insurance plans. The over-60 crowd anywhere is finding it increasingly hard, and expensive, to get insurance. UAL knows this, too, and could easily look unfavorably on such an expensive obligation as one it would like to shuck. So far, though, there has been, to our knowledge, no official word of such a plan, if one even exists.

Nevertheless, the pilots are a rational bunch, and know that, without organizing, they'll have a popsicle's chance in a tree chipper of maintaining any of what they've counted on. There are now, according to Crain's Chicago Business, nearly 1800 of them on the membership roster of the United Retired Pilots Benefit Protection Assn., a nonprofit formed in December. Perhaps they'll at least get heard.

FMI: www.ual.com; www.ualpilotpension.com