The contract. All I had to do was get within 4 hours of my guarantee, and then the company had to pay us 4.5 hours for every day of reserve that we had left for our calendar month. So I'd pick up flying early in the month to kick the trigger on this bylaw. Now that rule is gone, so I simply grab short calls to stay down low on the call list and avoid flying. I haven't seen an airplane since 8/24 of this year. It's been glorious.

FAR 117 has only affected line holders mostly. The line holders would scramble to grab deadheading in order to pad their pay and put extra flying on top of it. For us reserve folks we just chill and avoid work as much as possible.

And you are correct. We could get our days rolled, but it was WAY LESS LIKELY because we could split up our HDO's with the old contract. It was like 2 stop gaps in the schedule. When our contract negotiators worked on this contract, most of them were NOT global pilots and did pure domestic, so they didn't realize how the reserve rules crimped our lifestyle. Now we have to take all 6 HDO's in a row. Not cool.