US Airways Inc. said Monday it is adding 80 pilots and 420 flight attendants in coming months, offering further indication that airline employment may have hit bottom.

The most recent Bureau of Transportation Statistics numbers showed that the airline industry had 377,800 jobs in August, down 1.7 percent from the previous August.

But the year-over-year declines in full-time equivalent jobs are leveling off, with August’s decline the smallest in more than two years. Read the rest of this entry

Delta flight attendants have voted narrowly against unionization.

The returns that were released on Wednesday by the Association of Flight Attendants showed that only 49 per cent of flight attendants voted in favor of union. Delta Air Lines has 20,000 flight attendants, which include approximately 7,000 who came from Northwest Airlines in 2008.

The Northwest flight attendants have been in the union, although their Delta co-workers were not. The voting was to resolve ıf the union would cover all of them.

Flight attendants for Continental Airlines rejected a proposed tentative agreement on Wednesday, saying it doesn’t do enough to restore concessions they made previously.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said 55 percent of those voting rejected the deal. The union represents about 9,300 flight attendants at Continental.

The IAM said flight attendants want “full recovery of items sacrificed in the previous round of concessionary bargaining, such as sick leave, vacation,” and a 401(k) match. Read the rest of this entry

Airlines must eventually begin raising wages – even with the cost pressures they face – if they want to attract and retain employees, an aviation consultant said Monday.

Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group International, said airlines face the possibility that they won’t be able to attract employees, particularly pilots, without reversing the cost pressure to lower pay.

“We have an airline industry that is no longer going to be operating on low wages,” Boyd said at his company’s annual aviation conference in New Orleans. “We’re not going to have that anymore.” Read the rest of this entry

More than 85,000 people have applied for jobs as Delta Air Lines flight attendants since the Atlanta carrier announced two months ago that it planned to hire.

Delta in August said it would call flight attendants back to work from furlough and then hire new ones, targeting those with foreign language skills for international flights.

This week, Chief Executive Richard Anderson said in a message to employees that all flight attendants on voluntary furlough have had a chance to return to work, and about 425 will begin working next year. Read the rest of this entry

Delta Air Lines said Friday that it is adding back 1,000 flight attendants, including recalling 425 who were on a voluntary furlough.

The focus of the hiring is on foreign-language speakers who can work on international flights and speak languages including Japanese, Mandarin, Dutch and Spanish, airline spokeswoman Betsy Talton said.

The new flight attendants will begin training in January and should be flying by the middle of next year, she said. Delta, the largest airline at Detroit Metro, has received more than 85,000 applications for the flight attendant jobs. Read the rest of this entry