Delta Air Lines Pilots will find out if they voted for a pay cut, or essentially voted for sending the negotiations back to the judge and a potential company ending strike.

The Air Line Pilots Association is scheduled to tally ballots this afternoon in a ratification vote that decides whether pilots will give up 14 percent of their pay in a deal that union leaders endorsed this month. Pilots grudgingly slashed their pay by 32.5 percent last year in a failed effort to keep Atlanta-based Delta out of bankruptcy court.

If a majority of Delta’s 6,000 pilots go along with the latest concession, average pay will fall to $146,000 a year from $170,000.

The price of rejecting the deal could be even steeper, however. Delta and ALPA would return to a New York bankruptcy court where Delta had sought to tear up its existing pilot contract and impose harsher terms.

Pilots have said they will refuse to work without a contract and threatened a strike that Delta has called illegal. “If the deal’s not ratified, we end up back in court,” said John Culp, a Delta pilot and ALPA spokesman. “I don’t have any inkling of which way the vote’s going to go.”

 ajc.com.