Originally Posted by Elusive Napkin

So we are going to now advocate making deals with scheduling and be willing to do whatever the company wants in order to benefit your own personal situation?

This as so many of us are trying hard every day to hold the company to the CBA by enforcing contactable hours and reserve rules; you are saying that taking trips "at the last minute" and volunteering to work whenever they need you is the way to go. And what about the pilot who bid that line to Europe or Southeast Asia and is then replaced by someone who was already there? To say nothing of trying to maintain an already not-so-transparent open time system...

I know there is a lot of temptation to improve one's own personal situation. However, in these times, let us be mindful of the effects these actions can have on the entire group. We can all have a better situation in the next contract, but it takes a shared mental model now to accomplish it. It can't be "CBA compliance until it hurts me".

All is said in respect, and I hope you enjoy Atlas. Just trying to give the other side of your advice. I realize that living abroad is a totally different deal, but we still have to play under the same set of rules.

Originally Posted by DC8DRIVER

VXing prior to a trip is totally fine.

If you live overseas and there is a trip published in open time, and it starts where you live, then by all means bid for it. If you get assigned the trip, you should also be assigned the time and pay as though you began the trip from your base of record. In other words, if you live in Amsterdam where the open time trip starts but are based in ANC, you should be scheduled and paid for the time required to reposition to the Netherlands from ANC even though you are already in Amsterdam. You won't be paid the price of the plane ticket, but you'll have the "travel day(s)" at home and be paid the deadhead or Rig Time for that day(s). So there is a way to have it work out to your benefit.

Where the line is crossed (and it is being crossed by a few) is when a pilot calls scheduling and says "I'm in Amsterdam do you have any open trips over here?" and they then assign you a non published open time trip or assign you an open time trip out of seniority (frequently without even publishing the trip to the rest of the pilot group). There would be absolutely no way for another line pilot to track this violation and the company and the pilot assigned to the trip would have gotten away with screwing the rest of the group.

There is no transparency in the assignment of open time trips. If you were motivated, it might be possible to find out who was assigned an open trip (if you could even find out that there was an open trip to be had), but a line pilot would have no idea if it had been assigned correctly.

VX trips should be offered to crews of a specific base (or bases) in seniority order. If a pilot is assigned an unpublished trip or assigned a trip out of seniority, that is where the contract is violated. And it is happening now and it is a violation of the contract and a violation to your fellow pilots.

8

Originally Posted by Elusive Napkin

DC8 pretty much summed it up. There is nothing contractually wrong with VXing days before a trip. I was referring more to your comment of being willing to leave at a moment's notice and being flexible with scheduling to make things work. I think you will eventually find that they expect us all to be flexible with the CBA. But they especially find their guys in every zip code that they know are extraordinarily flexible.

Just for the hell of it, here's a few thoughts on VXing to be aware of.

Trips that are "open" should be offered to the entire pilot group or appropriate base. To qualify for an open time trip it needs to fit entirely in your days off. i.e. The open time trip needs to begin in your base then get you back to your base before the beginning of your next normal pattern.

For example, you just happen to be in HKG and are trying to get to ANC. You call scheduling and say "Hey I'm already here and I see that there is an open position to AUH. I'll VX a day to keep myself from having to commute to base." That's not okay. That trip should be offered and patterned with a DH from a base to HKG then to AUH.

More than likely they would just rip a guy off his pattern to cover it, but I'm trying to illustrate a point. The one leg you are doing to help you get to work could easily make another pilot (who isn't trying to enjoy the summer, and would rather be working for whatever reason) 3-4 days of pay instead of the 1 you are going to get.

Additionally whatever you were supposed to do in ANC now has to be worked by someone else, who was doing some thing else, etc etc etc.

Please understand, fadec, I'm not trying to be critical. Just merely tossing some information out there is all. You will find all sorts of interpretations of everything out on the line. One of our biggest issues in this pilot group is guys making the system work for them without thinking about the knock-on effect it has for everyone else. I guess it is just a different philosophy of how we all succeed together. Atlas seems to have a higher percentage of guys that just want to take care of #1. But that's just my 2 Yuan.