ALPA ADVANCING AVIATION SAFETY AND SECURITY SINCE 1931


Release #: Vol. 84, No. 3
April 01, 2015

Weighing In: Reinvesting in Our Future

By Capt. Randy Helling, ALPA Vice President—Finance/Treasurer

For the second year in a row, I’m proud to report that the Association is again significantly improving its financial standing. Preliminary consolidated results for 2014 indicate that your union is on track to generate a modest surplus of $8.2 million on $139 million in revenue. This is enabling ALPA to reinvest in the union itself, to replenish our various savings accounts, and to find new ways to deliver even better resources and services to you. ALPA and your union leaders are dedicated to the efficient and prudent use of your dues dollars and providing you with the best services in the business, tailored to your needs. And we were able to accomplish this in 2014 while lowering the dues rate from 1.95 percent to 1.9 percent—the first dues rate reduction in decades.

“ALPA and your union leaders are dedicated to the efficient and prudent use of your dues dollars and providing you with the best services in the business, tailored to your needs.”

We’re using our resources more effectively, eliminating nonessential activities, and concentrating on core priorities—best practices we must continue to maintain. But it’s also time to improve the infrastructure we use to best serve our members. Recently, the Association initiated a system modernization project to replace ALPA’s 20-year-old piecemeal infrastructure and its dated information storage capability that supports the union’s finances and other essential functions. Moreover, due to budget cuts in recent years, many parts of the software behind the system haven’t been updated for far too long.

In the coming years, the new systems will offer several upgrades to the way our members share, update, and receive information from the union. In the meantime, we’re making incremental improvements, including a new capability that allows ALPA pilots to generate letters that summarize their previous year’s dues for the purposes of filing taxes.

We’re also recapitalizing our strategic funds and taking measures to bolster the Major Contingency Fund (MCF), ALPA’s “war chest.” The MCF balance has steadily declined since 2006, ending last year at $44.3 million, and has been at its lowest level in decades due to the economic struggles that airlines and the union faced during this time. In 2015, the Association plans to allocate nearly $1.5 million to begin recapitalizing this important union asset. In addition, ALPA’s Board of Directors at its most recent meeting instructed the MCF Review Committee to assess the strategic uses of the MCF and to make recommendations about future target funding levels. The committee will report its findings and recommendations to the Association’s Executive Board later this year. 

We’re making similar efforts to recapitalize our Operating Contingency Fund (OCF), a source of supplemental funding available to our pilot groups facing extraordinary financial circumstances. Once nearly depleted, we’ve been growing this fund since 2011, finishing 2014 with a balance of $9 million. We must ensure that both the MCF and OCF are properly funded and accessible to our members when they need them. 

These kinds of improvements are possible thanks to our collective adherence to fiscal discipline and to a recovering economy and airline industry. 

Only by reinvesting in our infrastructure can we make the most of what we’ve accomplished as the largest and most influential airline pilots association and the leading independent airline safety and security advocate. I recently talked about this recapitalization effort with secretary-treasurers from our 30 member pilot groups, who convened in March in ALPA’s Herndon, Va., Conference Center (see “ALPA@Work,” page 32). These pilot representatives understand that by replenishing our support systems, we’re sending a strong message to the airline industry that ALPA is in it for the long haul.

We’ve been the premiere airline pilot organization for 84 years and have no plans of forfeiting that status. With sound financial planning and fiscal discipline, the Air Line Pilots Association, International will continue to have the resources necessary to meet the challenges of the future and remain the strongest, most effective, and most respected pilots union in the world.

This article is from the April 2015 issue of Air Line Pilot magazine, the Official Journal of the Air Line Pilots Association, International—a monthly publication for all ALPA members.

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