United To Lay Off Pilots, Cut Domestic Service

United Airlines said that it will lay off 950 pilots due to plans to reduce domestic flights in the face of skyrocketing fuel prices. That will affect about 15 percent of pilots. United issued a statement that said: "As we reduce the size of our fleet and take actions companywide to enable United to compete in an environment of record fuel prices, we must take the difficult, but necessary step to reduce the number of people we have to run our business; and today, we notified our pilots about expected furloughs. We continue discussions with ALPA and all of our unions on ways to mitigate involuntary furloughs, and we are working to notify all of our employee groups about furloughs as soon as we know the impact of our capacity reductions." The carrier said that it is continuing talks with the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and other unions on ways to ease the layoffs of company pilots.