Originally Posted by Dave Fitzgerald

You usually will have plenty of notice on reserve of trips. But, the crew desk still insists on building short calls, field standby is pretty useless and they don't use it much for the 777. The duty days are just too long, except the little amount of domestic flying that is done. Same problem with short call. Most international trips, the duty day is too long, and still the crew desk builds and assigns short calls.

However, one problem with reserve on the 777, usually they have enough reserves, but not in summer, its crazy. But when they are short, and it could be any base, they will use the short calls to DH you to, say ORD for a 6 day trip after that. That's fine for deviating on the DH, but it also means you can never tell when they are going to shift what base crews the trip. This also means last minute DH's, to cover flying in another base. The DH should be booked in first class; take a screen shot when they don't give you a 1st class seat. Must be available at the time of booking.

The crew desk considers rolling RDO's to be normal. Be prepared for not getting days off, even ones you have multiple RDO's on. That means, if you are using those days for military, it could get sticky fast. HDO's are the only guarantee.

Warning, thread drift ahead! As for our reserve system, nah, it doesn't need fixing. go ahead and roll any improvements another 2 years down the road.