Originally Posted by
The Cavalier
This...staff the airline. What is currently happening should surprise no one the least of which being scheduling/planning which is tasked with preparing for things like holiday flying. They saw this coming and accepted it. They decided that our passengers and the crews should pay the price rather than hire enough crews to properly run the airline so they could deliver the product our customers paid for....on Christmas Eve no less.
When enough flights get canceled that the media picks up on the story what will be the company's response? What will DALPA's response be?
Funny part about this is that we, as the pilots, are part of the problem. We have a lot of guys that are flying *****s. They don't know what to do with themselves if they aren't on the road 20-23 days a month. Some because of their home life, some because they've gotten themselves into financial coffin corner and have to fly that much.
Back in 2000 we were in negotiations with the company for C2K. There was a no overtime flying campaign which ended with the 49ers (49 guys sued by the company for posting stuff in the lounges, etc about no overtime flying). The company actually found a judge that looked at our historical overtime flying percentages over the holidays and said that we HAD to fly overtime. All this because historically we were cheap dates.
Me personally, I want a higher pay rate and fly the same or less, however even with higher rates there are a good many guys that would still fly the same hours.