Originally Posted by
Wingnutdal
The SWA reserve system is getting a lot of play in this thread. Having a brother who perpetually sits reserve over there, I'll throw in his opinion. If you're on reserve at SW you fly every day. Maybe 4-5 days a year does he not fly on a reserve day. So while I am on reserve 18-19 days, I have never been assigned responsibilities on every day of a month. So, there actually isn't that big a disparity in realized days off.
As with anything, there could be unintended consequences to some changes in our PWA, and this is one area. SWA pilots fly every day they are on reserve, which means there is no fat in their system. Which means they require fewer Pilots. Their whole system is set up to require the fewest number of pilots possible.
For reserve, I would like to see the pay raised to the ALV, or 75 hours. With the realization that reserves will fly to that, and it may require less manning.
Thanks for the perspective. I think the other part of this is that we cannot operate that way either because we are a different animal in terms of the scope of operations that we perform. For example, you as an ER reserve cannot fly a 3 day Europe trip then turn around and fly a trip to GRU or Asia because of theatre restrictions. Domestic to international has it's own particular pitfalls in this area which might preclude that kind of reserve system. The question would be then, what is the answer to those issues? On first glance, one might think that those restrictions might be better for us because a reserve is illegal to fly back to back trips in that configuration. I would think the company would balk at that because it makes us less efficient rather than more. I would balk at it because 14 days of SC would SUCK.
I agree with you that ALV needs to be 75 hours for reserve, and the buckets need to be lowered if not eliminated altogether.