Originally Posted by Herkflyr

Contrary to many recent posts, I see most reserves are sitting at home getting paid to grow a beard. Most widebody reserves aren't getting close to half the ALV, much less to the ALV. "Yeah but wait till summer" you say. Well, hmmm..., isn't that how things always are in this industry? Summertime flying picks up and pilots fly more? Or did I miss something?

The entire ALV+15, while I admit concessionary, isn't going to be nearly as onerous as you think, due to those pesky things called FARs. There is no way a domestic pilot is going to be flying 95 hours a month except as a statistical outlier--it certainly won't be the norm. Further, the 7 short call thing only takes effect when the new FT/DT rules are in effect, which limits any short call (domestic or international) to 14 hours.

The true reason for ALV+15 was the long 12-14 day trips flying to the Pacific that in the summertime frequently are worth 85+ hours.

Under the old contract if a pilot sicked out of one of those, not one reserve in the entire airline would be eligible to be assigned it, even if he had 15 or more continuous on call days, because you could not be assigned a trip that would cause you to exceed the ALV.

In prior eras, DAL (south) rarely had such trips, but the NWA side always did.

I do not believe it is unreasonable for the company to expect a reserve with zero hours to be assigned a published trip completely over his on call days. Any reserve in a WB category whose line started out with 18 straight on call days (which is common in such categories) should be eligible for such. Apparently the thinking on this forum disagrees.

As for "reserves are going to be slaughtered." I disagree. Reserves flying a bunch over summer?...yes, but isn't that what the airline industry is all about? At least now they have the calendar day average going for them, which applies to reserves and deadhead-only duty periods. While not perfect, now a two-day trip is always worth at least 9 hours to a reserve, where it might have only been worth four before!

Last, despite lots of complaints here, I believe that we would have furloughed long ago except for two things:

RA truly doesn't want to rock the boat with all the strategic moves he has in mind, and I think he has accepted the price of peace by having temporarily surplus pilot staffing.

The contractual provision that mandates the company remove all seats over 70 from every DCI aircraft if mainline so much as furloughs one pilot. Further, this isn't subject to force majeure and is much more effective than a blanket no-furlough clause which we have all seen is about worthless. If management wants the 76 seaters so bad--and apparantly they do--then it will be costly indeed to furlough anyone from the mainline.