The biggest change was to split American workers and retirees into separate groups for seat priority, as other U.S. carriers do, while creating a new priority category for retirees, called D2R. The merged airline scrapped a seniority system that US Airways had used to allot seats while cutting the number of free, one-way “buddy passes” that retirees receive each year, from two dozen to eight. Current workers receive 16 of these guest tickets per year. Taken together, the retirees’ lawsuit alleges, these changes place them “behind at least 500,000 people, including current employees and their spouses/domestic partners/registered companions and eligible children.”