Like almost everything else in this business, it's worth taking moderately seriously. I commuted to reserve when I started at the previous airline; I've only commuted briefly here or as a one-off ("let's try this flying out of here") sort of arrangement. I walked on eggshells when I did it at the previous employer, being on probation—I did NOT want to miss an assignment and have to explain that.
I commuted to SFO ER7 briefly before upgrade out of LAX; that was less than fun and reminded me why I didn't like commuting to DFW EMJ in a previous life. Most every day out to DFW I had to be in the night before, although proffering was awesome and so was getting morning short call when I couldn't get a proffer award. Dunno what I would've done with NYC, other than cry on the jumpseat for 5+ hours on end and not go home on anything less than 3 days off. It sucked. It was an experience, though, and there were bits of it that I enjoyed.
Regarding scary stuff/nerves: something of a rambling discussion on the topic follows:
In our current competitive environment, anything that causes a controllable cancellation gets serious attention. And not showing for a flight assignment with not enough notice to recrew it, resulting in an absolutely controllable cancellation, is going to get
serious attention too. (Imagine the cartoon snowball being pushed off the top of the mountain, gaining speed and size, and so on—by the time it reaches you, it's collected dirt, rocks, and sticks and is nasty.)
As I've discussed at least once before (although I'm pretty sure the thread was deleted after
@Derg got a legal threat from a n-th generation Arizonan who was not taking said responsibility seriously), reserve is a job like any others, and it is to be accomplished responsibly; you are not called when things are going right, you're called in to make it
work when they're not. On this subject, the needs of the many (not cancelling the flight) outweigh the needs of the one (I need to work). Calling in honest sucks, but the business is to load the people into the airplane and take them to the destination safely and on time (as able). Unfortunately, I can't move the airplane from my couch in my pajama pants and neither can you, as awesome as that would be - gotta be there to do it. Living in base as I do, I do a lot of reserve in said pajamas, but not everyone can or does do so. It's a pain. There are ways to make it better, but the basic professional responsibility remains the same.
(The Division goal is [or was, the last time I paid attention] to achieve a rate of controllable pilot crew-related cancellations of under 1 in 10,000 operations, if you were curious; with approximately 2,300 daily departures, this means a rate of well under 1 per day and works out to just over one
per week.)
A scheduling aside: One of the fallacies of Long Call is that it's 'better' than Short Call, to which I say "eh, well, maybe, but this is highly circumstantial and depends on the pairing mix and how close you live to work." LCR in EM2 LAX was cakewalk. LCR in any category with SDOs is not a winning proposition for me, since the LCR is the only pilot who can be reliably assigned one.
(This month in MSP I'm not touching LCR with a 10' pole because of the number of SDOs in the pairing package, for instance.)
I do, however, want a commuter clause so that everything is spelled out
V-E-R-Y C-L-E-A-R-L-Y if no other reason than it makes handling this consistent; out in MSP/DTW, the expected good faith commute effort is two flights before your showtime, but your mileage with your chief
will vary. Clear expectations and rules are in the interest of BOTH sides of the table.
