After reopening their cost-cutting contract talks Friday night, US Airways and its pilots union spent the weekend exchanging proposals near the airline's Arlington, Va., headquarters.

Union negotiators presented management with a new offer on Saturday, and the union expected to hear back from the company yesterday.

Last night, the 12 members of the union's Master Executive Council reconvened at a suburban Washington, D.C., hotel to discuss what to do next.

On Friday, the same council voted to reengage the company in negotiations after a breakdown in talks Aug. 22. The company is seeking $295 million in new annual concessions, claiming it needs that to stave off a second bankruptcy.

Until last weekend, the two sides were estimated to be as much as $80 million to $100 million apart and still divided over cuts to the pilots' retirement plan and the company's need for more furloughs.

The union council could have voted to send the company's most recent proposal out to all 3,000 pilots for a ratification vote, but it decided against that.

Both sides sound weary.

"We will work through the weekend if necessary to resolve the remaining differences," airline spokesman David Castelveter said on Friday, "but we must emphasize delay and denial are not in anyone's best interests."

The company has warned that a bankruptcy filing could happen by Sept. 10 if $800 million in new concessions are not in place from all labor groups.

The pilots have been negotiating since June 1, but the other groups are no closer to new agreements.

The machinists, in fact, have yet to agree to official contract talks. The flight attendants, expected to present the company with a counterproposal on Friday, said Saturday they had not received a "full costing" of the company's Aug. 18 proposal, which asked for $116 million in new cuts. So a new counterproposal will have to wait until that information is available, according to union President Perry Hayes.