Air Canada says it's likely that its operations will shut down as early as this weekend if a contract agreement isn't reached with its Pilot's Union the airline says that customers with bookings between September 15th and 23rd can make changes at no cost or receive a travel credit it says the policy will be expanded as warranted but notes that customers won't be eligible for extra compensation the union representing 5200 Pilots is pushing to see salaries get closer to what pilots in the US have negotiated Aviation expert John grck joined us to unpack the dispute uh the big debate of course is the compensation level that these Pilots are looking for um right now the U public um discourse is around 40 to 45% of a wage scale Improvement that the airline Union is looking for and that's coming off a contract that Air Canada had with the pilots had lasted about 10 years with an average annual increase somewhere around 2% so there's a lot of catchup uh to the various costs of increases that we've had over the last decade that Pilots are looking for um plus you know the other fact is that the the US Pilots have been getting some significant increases over the last uh few months you know between 30 and 40% so over and above the catch up there there 30 to 40% salary wage that's the pilots are looking for to catch up to competitive salaries in the US talking about a Canada looking at about 110,000 passengers a day um somewhere around I'd say $50 million worth of Revenue a day uh for every day that the airlines on strike um it is a significant amount of uh you know revenues um and the cost of settlement uh for the pilots is somewhere if you look at what they're looking for somewhere in a range of about $500 million to to cover so after about 10 days worth of uh lost Revenue you basically uh look at somehow some way trying to offset that against yeah the cost of a contract so it's not going to take long for uh or cooler heads to Prevail and for uh some type of settlement to show up within the next 10 days you're looking at a significant you know uh number of seats that will be pull from the marketplace there Canada is of course the largest carrier in Canada there are other carriers uh that have significant capacity WestJet uh 160 some some OD airplanes you have border with about 5 airplanes and you have flare plus you know significant number of regional carriers across Canada so it's not as if Canadians will be losing Air Services totally the the choices will be reduced prices will have gone up uh and uh it will make it'll make difficult for passengers to basically look at trips that have been disrupted by the air can