Originally Posted by
Systemized
PSA is not an expensive pilot group contrary to what many PSA pilots have said on here. Obtaining a significant amount of soft pay only comes when the company is short staffed. The company is not as short as they once were and swapping into trips without adding a net increase of days and getting paid 150% percent for the entire trip is becoming harder to do depending on your base and position. Normal premium pay is only 125% and only applies to the net days added to your schedule after the final bid award. Therefore, normal premium pay for open-time pickups can only net you an extra 10 hours a month at best.
We haven't started receiving acft yet. July 31 was the first
scheduled flight for our 900s. Staffing will be critical until June 2015 AT LEAST. That is when we will receive our last 900.
I referenced this in my post by not assuming that every single day would be critical.
Our union stated during roadshows for our original 2013 contract that something like 19% of days would be critical even during "optimal" staffing.
my scenario of 14 days off and 95 hours is not only realistic but almost guaranteed based on 1 out of every 5 days being critical FOREVER, no matter the staffing.
Now, worst comes to worst. No days are critical. I can still drop down to 65 hours and pick up my original flying at 1.25X after the SAP. So a 12 day off 85 hour line ends up being 12 days off and.....95 hours. All this while still deciding for myself which days I will, and will not, work.
I'm not looking to sugar coat this. I couldn't care less if not one single more pilot were hired here. The original argument was about how we "undercut" Eagle. I'll still standby my statement of our contract being just as costly as Eagle's. If we are the same price then we didn't "undercut" anything. The company is blowing steam up eagle's ass based on our payrates.
One more time: If Eagle's NC offered a carbon copy of PSA's contract to AAG it would be rejected immediately by the company. At the time of our TA last summer the SAP and the critical pay section of our contract weren't even effective yet. The company had no idea how effective those sections were going to be for our pilots both for time off and soft pay.
10 extra hours per month is a minimum, not a best case scenario.