Originally Posted by forgot to bid

Imagine if the weather had been bad?

A few months ago I noticed they lopped off reserves by 20 or so pilots or about 20% of the reserves since we tended to average around 100-110 pilots. So I decided to take a little look and what I found is the number of pilots on reserve is mostly all over the place and no discernible patterns related to say the ALV.

First, the number of lucky pilots in ATL88B has grown from around 490 in JAN12 to 530 today. The fewest pilots on reserve in terms of numbers was 72 in MAR12 and the highest was 115 in OCT12.

As a percentage of pilots on RES vs REG, we average 18.1%. The number on reserve does not seem to correlate with the ALV as a low 72 hour ALV has produced the highest percentile on reserve, JAN12 23%, and the lowest, 14.7% in MAR12. If the ALV climbed above 76 hours the percentage on reserve still seemed to be all over the place from the mid 16% range to the 20.4% range. So ALV doesn't seem to matter much.

But when you just look at the totals from JAN12 to MAY13, you do notice something. We went from 95 pilots on reserve from JAN12-JAN13 to an average of 85 for FEB13-MAY13. The % on reserve during that time went from 18.8% in JAN12-JAN13 to 16.1% in FEB13-MAY13. Four of the highest six months of total number of reserves occurred in OCT12-JAN13 and during that time we average in the 20-22% range of reserves or 104-115 pilots. Now we average 15.4-16.4% and 82-87 pilots on reserve from FEB13-MAY13.

I'm going to make an assumption here. We figured out how to get a month off: bid weekends off RES. Have fun, enjoy the spoils of seniority and the protection of the bucket system. Then we end up having senior RES pilots fly 0 hours, have 0 credit and 0 SCs. Great. But it doesn't seem to have gone unnoticed.

The company seems to have slashed reserves. Obviously, we didn't need them all if guys weren't flying ever. So now I see the guys in the 8000 range seniority numbers sitting 88B not at #40 on the long call list but #10 on long call and this is at the beginning of the month and not just the end when everyone moved to buckets 2, 3 and 4. This is their placement in Bucket 1.

Weekends have always been min staffed but now by the time the trips roll around, sick calls, weather, etc, there ain't enough. So my guess is you're going to see more on reserve in June than now, instead of 16.4% maybe 18% but probably not 20-22%.

/assuming