Originally Posted by
PeezDog
So I was talking to the guy I was flying with last week and he brought up a good point. His point was that sometimes senior FO's forget or don't care about reserve rules. Whenever it is a contract comes up for vote, please don't ignore this part of the contact. Remember, when you upgrade, you will be on reserve again. I hope everyone takes this into consideration, but we all know most senior CA's don't care. So its up to us. We all know how horrible our reserve rules are. For example, being converted to short call 7 times from long-call is garbage. Not being pay protected for a line that carries over into a month of reserve, is garbage. 8 hours ready reserve and four hours of pay, garbage. Waiting an hour to be released, garbage. ERJ guys, insert the rules you don't like, garbage. You get the idea.
As a dude who recently went from senior FO lineholder to extremely junior CA reserve, I both second this and am guilty of this. I hadn't given much thought to the reserve rules since the 3-4 months after I hit the line as a new hire. Now that I'm back in the meat grinder, it is a shock to the system. Add to that a grab bag of schedulers/supes, ranging from those who know the contract and are willing to work with you to find a solution everyone can live with, to others who are just combative and threaten you for no benefit to either party. It can suck sometimes, even at a place with decent rules like XJT. I think most of the suggestions so far have been spot on.
The things I would like to see:
- On your last day you are automatically released after 12 hours, but no later than 1800L.
- A "free drop" during the transition. I'm tired of the 4on/1off/3on BS.
- The block of reserve days is treated as a solid block, rather than individual days for the purposes of "vacation touching/dropping".