Former APA President Ed Sicher speaks at Chicago rally in 2022. The Tribune building now houses … [+]
One evening in early December, Ed Sicher will step into a Boeing 777 to fly as captain of an international flight, a big step for the longtime Boeing 737 pilot, the result of an upgrade that came in his 26th years as an American Airlines pilot.
The flight will have special significance for Sicher, 60, as an indicator that he has moved on with his life after his Oct. 7th ouster as president of the Allied Pilots Association, which represents 16,000 American pilots. After the APA board voted 15-5 to remove him at a Fort Worth meeting, “They had security escort me out the door the moment that vote ended,” Sicher said Monday in an interview, the first time he has spoken publicly about his removal.
Sicher’s removal resulted from his opposition to an effort by the Air Line Pilots Association to merge with APA. ALPA represents 78,000 pilots at 41 U.S. and Canadian airlines and is a powerful voice in Washington. A group of pilots called American Pilots For ALPA has been seeking a merger since 2022.
Removal surprised Sicher. “I had been running a very aggressive anti-ALPA movement at APA,” he said. “But I didn’t think they had the votes to remove me.”
The APA board has 20 members, two from each domicile. Recent elections have brought in more pro-ALPA leaders. “Every pro-ALPA domicile rep voted to remove me,” Sicher said. “But they needed help, because they didn’t have a majority. So they brought in six reps who didn’t like the way the last contract was closed out.”
As older pilots have retired, some 3,000 to 5,000 recent hires have joined American from regional carriers where ALPA represented them at a time when regionals were seeking to lure pilots. “They never had a cloudy sky in their careers; they are coming from regionals where they got $100,000 signing bonuses and hotel rooms,” Sicher said. “They are completely different from the older generation that has been on the property for 25 years,” during give backs, slow upgrades and a bankruptcy. Many younger pilots are loyal to ALPA, he said.
Sicher said he will continue to oppose ALPA. He said that ALPA dues are higher, 1.85% compared with 1%. Additionally, he said, ALPA’s approach differs from APA’s. “We’re independent,” he said. “We do what’s best for American pilots, without others involved.” For instance, APA spoke out strongly about Boeing’s dangerous lost focus on safety “APA is the only one willing to hold Boeing’s feet to the fire,” Sicher said: An ALPA spokesman disagreed.
It is clear that Sicher’s departure has altered APA’s thinking. “The pilots of APA have spoken and elected new leadership,” ALPA President Jason Ambrosi said Wednesday in an email. “We look forward to working with them on issues for the benefit of both our memberships.”
This month, Nick Silva, the Dallas-based 737 pilot who replaced Sicher as APA president, attended ALPA’s board of directors meeting in Chicago. Subsequently, he posted a message entitled “Collaboration is Key” in the APA News Digest. It begins, “One of my top priorities as your APA president is to reestablish effective collaboration with our peers.” Silva said he attended both a Southwest Airlines Pilots Association conference and the ALPA board meeting. Both events provided “opportunities for renewed information exchange, networking and relationship building,” he said, adding, “Our profession is a small, select community and it is essential that we work together.”
Sicher took office as APA president in July 2022, expecting to serve a three-year term that ends in 2025. He joined American in 1998 after 12 years of active Air Force, including combat in Bosnia. He was Miami domicile vice chair from 2015 to 2018 and chairman in 2021 and 2022.
As president, he presided over negotiations that led to the August 2023 approval of a four-year contract, valued at $9.6 billion, that raised wages about 40% over four years.
The path to a contract was not a straight line. In bargaining, an earlier tentative agreement was discarded after United reached a tentative deal. Sicher opposed the first deal as securing too little. When a second deal was being negotiated, he opposed those who “tried to add ornaments to the Christmas tree at the end of negotiations.
“When I became president, the board was shooting way too low on the contract at the table,” he said. “I told the members it wasn’t good enough.” He encouraged a board vote that declined to send that first deal out to the members. Then he waited for an Alaska Airlines agreement that provided many quality-of-life improvements and a Delta contract step-up that included financial improvements. “I told the board ‘stop trying to be first,” he said.
Pilots who wanted to stack on more argued that negotiations could move to the National Mediation Board, but Sicher said no. “I talked with a dozen other unions, and they all told me that NMB was just a process for delay,” he said. “So I opposed that. Five of those who voted to get rid of me were because of the bitterness from those negotiations.” While the first tentative deal was worth $1.7 billion, the second was valued at $9.6 billion.
“I’m proud of what I accomplished in my tenure,” Sicher said. “It was the best contract American airlines have seen in the past 25 years and one we will be proud of in the future. And every time I walk through the airport, I get a lot of thank yous for what we did.”