Judge extends hearing between Allegiant, pilots to next week

Allegiant Air pilots, threatening to strike, and company executives, hoping to block them, got their day in court Friday.

Now, they’ll get at least two more next week.

After hearing about six hours of court testimony, technical explanations about flight scheduling and legal wrangling, U.S. District Judge Andrew Gordon agreed to continue court proceedings to Wednesday and Thursday as company management sought an injunction blocking APA Teamsters Local 1224, representing the airline’s pilots, from striking.

With the hearing continued, union officials pledged not to consider a strike until proceedings are completed next week.

Lawyers for the two sides huddled during a break after two hours of introductory remarks in an attempt to head off a lengthy hearing. When they returned from the break, Teamsters attorney Ed Gleason told the judge what he didn’t want to hear — that the two sides were still far enough apart that they needed to have an evidentiary hearing on the injunction request.

Labor lawyer Douglas Hall, representing Allegiant management, and Gleason met after Gordon asked the Teamsters to consider a management proposal to restore some work rules in exchange for a promise from pilots that they would not walk off the job before mediated negotiations are undertaken in late April.

Gordon spent most of the morning explaining how Friday’s session would be about Allegiant’s request for an injunction blocking a strike and not a hearing on issues raised by pilots in a lawsuit filed last year.

Gordon acknowledged that some of the evidence from the pilots’ claim was important to the injunction request, but he said he did not want to try that case when the issue at hand was the strike threat.

“There are a lot of moving parts to this,” Gordon told the parties in his introductory remarks.

But he added that his primary goal was to avert a strike that could affect thousands of Allegiant customers and other airline employees.

In the afternoon session, Jude Bricker, Allegiant’s vice president of planning, spent more than two hours on the stand giving technical explanations about how Allegiant’s pilot scheduling system works.

Gordon had said that a system that demonstrated “seniority, transparency and predictability” for the pilots would weigh in his decision on granting the injunction.

Allegiant management requested and was granted a temporary restraining order blocking the pilots last week pending the outcome of the hearing.

The two sides have been meeting with a mediator for a year with little progress toward what would be Allegiant’s first union contract.

Contact reporter Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Find @RickVelotta on Twitter.