Morbid curiosity. Upgrade times?

Alchemy said:
TL;DR: 747 pays at least 15-20% more because of CBA nuances, and there is potential for OT-inclined people to make much much more.

The big W2 numbers you hear thrown around at DL, FX, etc are being pulled here too, mostly on the 747. They did away with the "credit cap" for trips that touch China starting in 2020. Everyone used to be limited to 104 hours per month, but now you can go all out on overtime trips at 150%, but mostly on the 747 because that's the main China jet. It takes a high hotel jail tolerance though. 150 hours of monthly credit with half of that being at 150% pay isn't uncommon. You can do the math on that with $250/$350 hour payrates. Then there are things like getting held out for more than 2 days past your scheduled return to domicile, where you get paid 350%, etc, which mostly happen on the 747.




Just lurking/working! They imprisoned me in a dimly lit building and allowed me to dole out video-game based torture to unsuspecting victims starting about 2 years ago. What were they thinking? PM incoming!
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Yup, I've lost count how many LP1 and 2 I've earned this year. And it always begins with TPE.
 
Alchemy said:
TL;DR: 747 pays at least 15-20% more because of CBA nuances, and there is potential for OT-inclined people to make much much more.

The big W2 numbers you hear thrown around at DL, FX, etc are being pulled here too, mostly on the 747. They did away with the "credit cap" for trips that touch China starting in 2020. Everyone used to be limited to 104 hours per month, but now you can go all out on overtime trips at 150%, but mostly on the 747 because that's the main China jet. It takes a high hotel jail tolerance though. 150 hours of monthly credit with half of that being at 150% pay isn't uncommon. You can do the math on that with $250/$350 hour payrates. Then there are things like getting held out for more than 2 days past your scheduled return to domicile, where you get paid 350%, etc, which mostly happen on the 747.




Just lurking/working! They imprisoned me in a dimly lit building and allowed me to dole out video-game based torture to unsuspecting victims starting about 2 years ago. What were they thinking? PM incoming!
Click to expand...

Hope you're doing great; long time no chat. Question for you:

You guys were capped at 104 hours of pay per month? Our new CBA initially had a pay cap (well, somewhat of one...some nuance there) of 115 hours. Lots of people angry about that. It's since been moved up to 130 hours with the new CBA enhancement. Interesting to see that UPS has/had something similar.
 
dasleben said:
Hope you're doing great; long time no chat. Question for you:

You guys were capped at 104 hours of pay per month? Our new CBA initially had a pay cap (well, somewhat of one...some nuance there) of 115 hours. Lots of people angry about that. It's since been moved up to 130 hours with the new CBA enhancement. Interesting to see that UPS has/had something similar.
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Doing great Thanks!

It's a 208 hour per bid period credit cap. A bid period is 56 days, except the last one of every year is 28 days for which the credit cap is 104 hours.

I guess if you extrapolated that to 5Y bid intervals, for 30 day bids it'd be about a 111 hour per bid cap or 222 per 60.

It's a bit controversial within the pilot group, but it's designed to encourage more hiring and upgrades as opposed to staffing the airline based on Open Time, or as they call it here "JA" (junior assignment, which makes no sense because it's not assigned, it's voluntary 150% extra flying, but I'm sure there's a historical reasoning). I'm assuming the companies aren't fans since every additional employee comes with increased fixed costs. The credit cap is still very much in effect, but in exchange for giving crewmembers the option to decline to go to China in 2020, the union agreed to lift the credit cap for uncovered trips that included a China leg. At the time HKG wasn't a big issue, so interestingly it only applies to "mainland China" - PVG, SZX, CGO etc. HKG was never added after it went downhill, but there were a few other LOA's/MOU's covering medical evac from there, etc. before they finally suspended HKG overnights earlier this year.
 
Going way back, JA wasn't voluntary. If you answered your phone you were required to take the trip. They supposedly ran JA's starting from the bottom of the list going up. Of course, there was no way for anyone to really know what skeds is doing, which hasn't changed at all. In any case, maybe the 98 contract, JA's became voluntary. You could answer the phone, find out what it is, and say no.
 
When I was a new hire at Eagle I was chilling on my day off and had just cracked a beer while playing a vidya game. My phone rang and it was the crew desk. I remember thinking “I wonder what they want?”

So. I. Answered the phone!

“hello first officer we have a trip for you it departs in 2 hours, thank you…”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“you’re being junior manned.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“you have to come to work.”

“that’s not going to happen, sorry.”

“it will be a missed assignment?”

“ok.”

I stopped by the chief pilots office before my next trip, and explained that I was very confused to be getting a missed assignment on my day off. He laughed. Deleted the missed assignment and said “don’t answer your phone on your day off.”
 
bLizZuE said:
When I was a new hire at Eagle I was chilling on my day off and had just cracked a beer while playing a vidya game. My phone rang and it was the crew desk. I remember thinking “I wonder what they want?”

So. I. Answered the phone!

“hello first officer we have a trip for you it departs in 2 hours, thank you…”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“you’re being junior manned.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“you have to come to work.”

“that’s not going to happen, sorry.”

“it will be a missed assignment?”

“ok.”

I stopped by the chief pilots office before my next trip, and explained that I was very confused to be getting a missed assignment on my day off. He laughed. Deleted the missed assignment and said “don’t answer your phone on your day off.”
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You were new, new! :D
 
bLizZuE said:
When I was a new hire at Eagle I was chilling on my day off and had just cracked a beer while playing a vidya game. My phone rang and it was the crew desk. I remember thinking “I wonder what they want?”

So. I. Answered the phone!

“hello first officer we have a trip for you it departs in 2 hours, thank you…”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“you’re being junior manned.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“you have to come to work.”

“that’s not going to happen, sorry.”

“it will be a missed assignment?”

“ok.”

I stopped by the chief pilots office before my next trip, and explained that I was very confused to be getting a missed assignment on my day off. He laughed. Deleted the missed assignment and said “don’t answer your phone on your day off.”
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Reminds me of when I was a mad dog FO.

ACARS message says “How would first officer Taylor like an inverse assignment”

I replied “he would not”.

I was sitting on the jumpseat of my commuter flight home and got a call from crew scheduling asking where I was and I said “I answered the question and I’m on my way home”

”You might get a call from the chief pilots office about this”

”I’ll call him myself when I get to PHX”

I explained what they said, how I answered and he told me to have a nice day and sorry for the hassle from crew scheduling.
 
I made the mistake of answering my phone at the end of a trip with Pinnacle once. The scheduler must have been so used to people not picking up that she didn't notice I wasn't my voicemail. She left me a message and hung up. I stood their in disbelief for a minute and then commuted home. Luckiest thing that happened to me in that 4 years.
 
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DE727UPS said:
Going way back, JA wasn't voluntary. If you answered your phone you were required to take the trip. They supposedly ran JA's starting from the bottom of the list going up. Of course, there was no way for anyone to really know what skeds is doing, which hasn't changed at all. In any case, maybe the 98 contract, JA's became voluntary. You could answer the phone, find out what it is, and say no.
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We still have that, but it's an opt-in process to receive the call. Answering on the Y list means Yes, you're going flying.
 
Derg said:
Reminds me of when I was a mad dog FO.

ACARS message says “How would first officer Taylor like an inverse assignment”

I replied “he would not”.

I was sitting on the jumpseat of my commuter flight home and got a call from crew scheduling asking where I was and I said “I answered the question and I’m on my way home”

”You might get a call from the chief pilots office about this”

”I’ll call him myself when I get to PHX”

I explained what they said, how I answered and he told me to have a nice day and sorry for the hassle from crew scheduling.
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I jumpseated to work on Mesa and got to see an epic JA avoidance…scheduling acars’ed the CA that we was being assigned, which they ignored. Then ops replied to their in range call with “the ca has an assignment”, which they didn’t reply to. They told the FA to not put down the rails on the stairs so the jetbridge couldn’t be connected, and as soon as he set the parking brake the CA grabbed his stuff and peaced out across the ramp as the gate agent stood in the bridge and yelled at him. Which of course he couldn’t hear because of company required earplugs.

Edit: also, it was his kids bday and he had talked about the party the whole leg. Screw mandatory JA’s, I would have taken a significant pay cut to keep those out.
 
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Alchemy said:
Doing great Thanks!

It's a 208 hour per bid period credit cap. A bid period is 56 days, except the last one of every year is 28 days for which the credit cap is 104 hours.

I guess if you extrapolated that to 5Y bid intervals, for 30 day bids it'd be about a 111 hour per bid cap or 222 per 60.

It's a bit controversial within the pilot group, but it's designed to encourage more hiring and upgrades as opposed to staffing the airline based on Open Time, or as they call it here "JA" (junior assignment, which makes no sense because it's not assigned, it's voluntary 150% extra flying, but I'm sure there's a historical reasoning). I'm assuming the companies aren't fans since every additional employee comes with increased fixed costs. The credit cap is still very much in effect, but in exchange for giving crewmembers the option to decline to go to China in 2020, the union agreed to lift the credit cap for uncovered trips that included a China leg. At the time HKG wasn't a big issue, so interestingly it only applies to "mainland China" - PVG, SZX, CGO etc. HKG was never added after it went downhill, but there were a few other LOA's/MOU's covering medical evac from there, etc. before they finally suspended HKG overnights earlier this year.
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Thanks man, that's helpful. We have a few supermen here (as you well know) who apparently don't like their wives/kids, and are absolutely pissed beyond belief that the union would have the AUDACITY to create a process to put pilots with 115+ hours of credit (err, now 130 hours) to the bottom of the open time volunteer list. It's not even a hard limit; they can (and are) still called for OT, but they get last call instead of first.

The funny part of the whole thing is that I often hear it from junior FOs; you know, the people *helped* by the new system. Rabble rabble, socialist open time system and all that... ;)
 
dasleben said:
The funny part of the whole thing is that I often hear it from junior FOs; you know, the people *helped* by the new system. Rabble rabble, socialist open time system and all that... ;)
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We have a 90 hour pay cap (although you can carry a 25 hour bank). Rough math says that without the caps, for every 8 pilots we'd need one less guy. And yet mostly the people complaining the loudest about the caps are junior captains who wouldn't even hold the left seat if we didn't have them.
 
We have a makeup bank. Theoretically anything you pick up you had to have dropped that number of hours previously.
That's everything at straight time. You can theoretically drop your whole schedule for months on end.
Draft is paid at 150% and it's up to the company when to offer that.

We can also proffer, pilot to pilot. With or without using the makeup bank.
 
mikecweb said:
We have a makeup bank. Theoretically anything you pick up you had to have dropped that number of hours previously.
That's everything at straight time. You can theoretically drop your whole schedule for months on end.
Draft is paid at 150% and it's up to the company when to offer that.

We can also proffer, pilot to pilot. With our without using the makeup bank.
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Are there staffing requirements to drop, or can you just be like “nah, I’m not coming in.”
 
Anybody upgrade to a lengthy commute? Curious how that went, especially if you still have kiddos at home.
 
ZapBrannigan said:
Anybody upgrade to a lengthy commute? Curious how that went, especially if you still have kiddos at home.
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Nothing is lengthy from DAL. The entire country can be reached in 4 hours.

A 4 hour commute isn't fun, but also isn't the end of the world. Block up as much flying as you can at once.
 
jtrain609 said:
Nothing is lengthy from DAL. The entire country can be reached in 4 hours.

A 4 hour commute isn't fun, but also isn't the end of the world. Block up as much flying as you can at once.
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Oakland is a problem. Only 2 nonstops a day not including the freighters.
 
jtrain609 said:
It's on company metal, that's the easiest commute you can do.

Also, there's a company flight to SJC, an Alaska flight to SFO, and a bunch of flights out of DFW.
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You are making it sound easy. [emoji23] At the end of the day though it's back to weekend reserve and missing out on college tours and prom and all of those other fun things during last few years of the offspring's high school career. Two separate problems I know.

This is ultimately an ego problem. We don't really need the money. It's 26 years of being a copilot and just want to try out the other seat for a while.
 
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