I think American and Conteniental are the only 2 legacy passenger carriers that have kept their pension plans. Northwest says they will if Congress passes / Bush signs pension reform before a certain date but that probably won;t happen (A4s?). AA and CO are also the only 2 legacy carriers that have not gone bankrupt so have not had the opportunity to dump their pension plans. (ABX, FedEx & UPS pilots have not lost anything either, but the cargo airlines are making profits.)
At Hawaiian, we did pretty good in the retirement area coming out of our bankruptcy last year. We still have our Defined Benefit (pension) plan until 1/1/2008. At that time, those that were 50 and over on 7/1/2005 will stay with the DB plan and keep accumulating their pension. Those that were 49 and younger will have their DB plan frozen and start receiving company payments into a Defined Contribution plan. The total DC contributions to the pilot group will be an amount that equals 17% of the pilot payroll. Individual amounts will vary as they try to get the DB+DC total monthly amount for each pilot as close as possible to what he would have received if the DB plan had remained. New hires will get a fixed 10% DC.
Some of those Delta guys that left early with lump sums are now flying at Southwest, FedEx, UPS and AirTran. Many were in their early 50s so have plenty of time to still fly.
The employees at the passenger airlines have unfairly taken the brunt of the losses due to mismanagement and increased fuel prices. Management gets bonuses & stock options for taking the company into and out of bankruptcy while employees lose pay & benefits. Passendgers get cheap tickets, the government cloects higher taxes & fees, and the oil companies make record profits while the airline employees lose pay & benefits. It's only been in the last year that airlines have started raising ticket prices to compensate for higher fuel costs - after they bled the employees dry.
There was an article in a newspaper (I forget which one - it seems I read a different one each day as I travel a lot) last week that said long-haul ticket prices (when adjusted for inflation) are 40% cheaper and short-haul are 17% cheaper than they were when the airlines were in the early 1980s.