Talks continue with flight attendants as well as the union representing mechanics, baggage handlers and other ground workers.
The delay until 2015 is to give families that use these attendants, as well as state Medicaid programs, time to prepare.
Inside, the air was overpressurized, and the flight attendants as confused as the color scheme, a mix of white and "magenta" that ranged from borscht to spilled zinfandel.
The pilot and a couple of flight attendants, as quietly as they could, were giving CPR to the person lying there.
Usually a bustling place full of officials and attendants as well as a tight net of security, it is a ghost palace now, abandoned, eerily silent and profoundly destroyed.
And they have struggled over the years to keep things interesting, using wisecracking flight attendants as well as deadly serious warnings about emergency slides, water landings and the dreaded "loss of cabin pressure".
Captain Lockwood's wife, Sandi Lockwood, also hired in 1981, will be one of the flight attendants, as will his sister-in-law, Nancy Cortez, and his brother-in-law, Raymond Cortez.
A recent settlement with its pilots made them the highest paid in the industry, leading to demands for similar raises from its machinists and flight attendants as well as workers at rival airlines.
The company counters that it is paying its flight attendants as well or better than competitors, and is more than willing to give them raises.
Worse, it is now believed that some of the box-cutters used to terrorize passengers and flight attendants as well as the pilots were pre-placed onboard the aircraft.
These technologies are also displacing workers from assembly-line and routine service jobs (bank tellers, telephone operators, petrol station attendants), as well as any skilled jobs that can be replicated by software (brokers, accountants, insurance claims adjusters).
