Realistically, what do you want?

Sir.... SIR. Will you follow all directions from a uniformed crewmember for the duration of our flight? I need a yes or a no. :)
 
Doug Taylor said:
Additionally, at my airline, seniority doesn't always dictate if you'll be on reserve or not. Lots of senior guys bid reserve in order to not fly very often OR manipulate the system vis-a-vis "Rolling Thunder" as they call it. Theoretically, if you're sufficiently senior, bid reserve in a month that coverage is thin, you can pull down paychecks in the right seat of the ER that rivals the guy in the left seat by far.

Reserve, in itself, it's an anathema, but the work rules surrounding how a company can contractually treat their reserve pilots is the issue. Improve the reserve work rules.

12 to 18-hour long call, a number of limited 8-hour call days, improve offline deadheading, full-pay for the scheduled rotation, yadda yadda yadda. That's how you fix it. Create an incentive to bid reserve rather than leave it broken and dole it out to everyone fleet-wide.
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Ahh yes, but look at the attitude of the union man:


Velocipede said:
You pay your dues, you get the benefits of your seniority.
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Herein lies the problem, most senior guys aren't going to vote for a change to the reserve system over something that will benefit them ( since they don't have to be on reserve ). So current reserve systems will continue to be what they are, which in most cases is bad.

Level the playing field. Make it so all 767 Captains do roughly the same thing on a yearly basis. All 767 First Officers do roughly the same thing on a yearly basis. All MD-88 Captains do roughly the same thing on a yearly basis and so on and so on.

How is it fair that a guy hired one week or one year before you can continually hold that great trip to somewhere you would like to go, while you get stuck going to somewhere not so nice ? Are you better than him? Are you smarter than him? Do you deserve a better life than him?

With a 5 group rotating bid system you have roughly 2 months per year where you get a pretty awesome schedule, 2-3 that are very good, 2-3 that are good, 2-3 that are below average, and 2 that suck. You still have seniority within your bid group so that has an affect on your results. If you are the top guy in your bid group versus the bottom guy it will make a difference.

This would provide an incentive for all pilots to want a liveable resserve system since they are all going to sit reserve for some period of time each year. It would also provide an incentive to make the "junior" pairings better since all pilots will be flying them at some point in the year.


Typhoonpilot
 
Nah, Velo and I have two altogether very different perspectives on the same problem.

Don't forget, I wasn't always senior nor will I always be senior so I'm not engaging in "class" warfare at all. I was only classified as a "eurosnob" about two years ago when I left a very senior position on the MD-88 FO seat in SLC and took a massive seniority hit to go to the ER, but not enough to push me back to reserve because I'm a commuter. Being a commuter has cost me a crap-ton of money over my career because I don't chase seats or airplanes.

From my perspective, we all have career choices. You can get a job in the as a production engineer at a large firm and have a great career. You can be offered a promotion to project manager but you may not want to deal with the expanded pressures and expectations of doing it. Might even be offered a job as office manager or even CEO, but that comes at a particular opportunity cost as well.

Seriously. I know guys that were four year MD-88/90 captains that complained to no end about being the plug and the reserve system. Our reserve system is wrecked, but not nearly as bad as most, primarily because we got our butts whipped after 2001 and 2005. The system we had previous was pretty darned good and if you lived local, you had a better QOL than senior line-holding pilots.

Otherwise we're proposing a universal fix to a problem that might not be universal.

Reserve isn't necessarily the problem. The contractual implementation of reserve is. Hell, if we had an ER base here in PHX, I'd bid reserve, bid "low" and mountainbike all day on my long call days. I think it's an 18-hour callup on long call.

Just like PBS isn't fish nor foul. The implementation of PBS can be a net benefit to the pilot group (like I think it is in our case) or can be a big bullwhip your beat your pilots half to death with on a monthly basis.

The only way to improve reserve is getting involved in the organization, communicating with your representatives and stop looking at solely pay rates to determine if you're the top dog on the contract comparison chart.

We need to educate that it's both pay AND work rules.
 
Doug Taylor said:
Reserve isn't necessarily the problem. The contractual implementation of reserve is. Hell, if we had an ER base here in PHX, I'd bid reserve, bid "low" and mountainbike all day on my long call days. I think it's an 18-hour callup on long call.
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Psst, hey Doug, It also helps to understand those reserve rules! Hate to break it to you, but the whole "high" and "low" yellow no longer exists. The only thing you can do now is lower your RAW score 15 points which puts closer to being called out. Not what you want to do if you don't want to fly. plus it's only 12 hours on LC. When was the last time you sat reserve?

If that isn't what you meant, never mind.
 
Cptnchia said:
Psst, hey Doug, It also helps to understand those reserve rules! Hate to break it to you, but the whole "high" and "low" yellow no longer exists. The only thing you can do now is lower your RAW score 15 points which puts closer to being called out. Not what you want to do if you don't want to fly. plus it's only 12 hours on LC. When was the last time you sat reserve?

If that isn't what you meant, never mind.
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Sounds like you need calculus from college to understand the DL reserve rules. :crazy:
 
I'd like to see:

12 days off for line holders; and CDO lines.

CDO's = 5 hrs Credit

No more than 3 consecutive CDO's

12/24 hour long call reserve

Abolish Junior Manning

On line trip trades

Block or better on a leg by leg basis (i.e. if you get a turn pulled you get your gaurantee + your over that you flew)

Sick time paid long enough to cover the longest single trip we are allowed to do(i.e. a 4 day trip. Currently we only get 3 days paid if we call in sick for a 4 day.)

Pay increase of some sort of course

I would take all 8 of the things I listed before a straight pay increase.
 
Doug Taylor said:
We need to educate that it's both pay AND work rules.
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Hence the thread. ;) I was trying to drive home the point that there is more to look at when evaluating a prospective employer than simply pay alone. At the same time, we also must take work rules (and things like scope) into major evaluation when negotiating improvements in our own lives at the companies we work for today.

Personally, I think we have some outstanding work rules at my company. Some things need to be adjusted and improved, but overall we have a great contract. I just wish we could raise the bar in terms of regional compensation.

One of the biggest things I'd like to see is getting away from pay on equipment type, and going to a uniform scale similar to what UPS currently has. That way, someone who decides to bid domestic narrowbody to stay in a relative time zone and be home more doesn't need to take a large hit in pay to do so. Of course have per diem based on domestic/international flying.
 
BTW, if it makes anyone feel better, neither company I've worked for has Junior Manning.

You can be extended, but only on reserve, and several criteria must be met. And it is equally applied, without regards to seniority. (Hopefully this too will be exterminated on the CBA being worked on now....)
 
Doug Taylor said:
Reserve isn't necessarily the problem. The contractual implementation of reserve is. Hell, if we had an ER base here in PHX, I'd bid reserve, bid "low" and mountainbike all day on my long call days. I think it's an 18-hour callup on long call.
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There ya go. I wouldn't be near the bitter, jaded person I've become if it wasn't for being abused the past 12 months. Basically, once PBS hit, our scheduling section was tossed out the window by management since the person that does their "interpretations" deemed it no longer applied.....unless, of course, THEY need something out of it. As a result, the PBS section in our new contract us rumored to be EIGHTY FOUR pages long. That's assuming we ever get the company to agree to scope language. Without that, it isn't even being put to a vote, much less passing.

If I could sit at home 15 days out of the month (10 off with 5 home RSV days I didn't get called), I'd be happy as a pig in slop. However, if I DON'T get called on home RSV for a trip, they pull me in to sit airport reserve for nine hours. I've dodged one bullet in 4 months, and that was the only home reserve I haven't been called this year so far. There's nothing in the contract that says how they allocate who gets called for airport reserve, so they more or less pull names out of a hat. We've had senior reserve guys sitting airport reserve FIVE DAYS in a row.....for nine hours a day. If RR was something less insane, like 4 hours, it wouldn't be so bad. Our trips are getting bad, too, since the company is insisting we're "overstaffed" on CAs. Mock PBS award for June has lineholders down to 12 or so days off with 90+ hours of credit on a LOT of those lines. These are guys that last month had 15-18 days off and flew 80 or so hours. They're not happy, and the reserve guys aren't happy b/c we know we're gonna get stuck with the 5 leg day, reduced rest overnight, 5 leg day, 10 hours in base, high speed shtick b/c the line holders are gonna either call in sick or fatigued for those.

Another thing I'd like to see is if you've got a trip assigned to you as a reserve pilot, that's it. So, if you have a trip that ends in base at 9 am, you're DONE. Every time I get one of those trips, I get frantic voice mails, ACARS messages, airport pages and notes slipped under my door from the hotel front desk to call them. It's normally b/c they saw I was done at 9 am, and they've dropped another 4 legs on me for the day. We've got a clause that says, basically, if you get less than 9 hours of rest, they can only schedule you for a 12 hour duty day the next day. Normally, if it's gonna be 11:59, instead of saying "Maybe we should get someone else" they say "LOOK! It fits PERFECT!"
 
[modhat]What is this, the 8th grade? Let's have an intelligent discussion about the topic at hand.[/modhat]
 
Cptnchia said:
The reason that you could hold the ER as a new hire wasn't because no one wanted to sit reserve, it was because guys like me, 2001 hire, didn't want to sit reserve for 8 SCs, and basically no more money an hour over domestic. It just wasn't worth my time to fly the ER. Now with the pay changes and a little less oenerous SC situation, I'm ATL ER.
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That is basically what I was saying.



Wait, what? Is that your new SL number? And you are 1000 from a captain's slot now?
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You know what? I forgot that the new seniority list does not take into account the new numbers. It still goes by the pre-merger ones so, I was going off of that.

I'll make it easier and do an apples to apples comparison. Pre-merger I was about 1000 numbers from holding NYC M88 A. The merger WILL throw that off quite a bit, unfortunately.
 
[modhat]Alright folks, two red cards for two different users in say, three minutes after I woke up? If you can't have a rational adult discussion, head on down to the lav and talk about the PS3 until you're able to[/modhat]
 
Capt. Caucasian said:
I'll make it easier and do an apples to apples comparison. Pre-merger I was about 1000 numbers from holding NYC M88 A. The merger WILL throw that off quite a bit, unfortunately.
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OK, that makes more sense. I was 250+/- from NYC88A pre-merger. I don't even want to look at it post.
 
I honestly didn't even look. But I think the 9 Plugs are still pretty junior, aren't they?
 
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