Originally Posted by
Andy
... temporarily exiting lurker mode ...
The hire until you furlough saying is due to the training pipeline that needs to be built. If the music stops tomorrow and growth stops, we'd probably be instantly overmanned by ~1000 pilots due to the training pipeline.
I think that fixing reserve is critically important, but if the company comes to us asking for pay cuts after we pass this TA, we may be able to trade that pay raise for better reserve rules - and we'd probably be able to get those changes a lot faster than full section 6 negotiations.
There are a lot of different ways that everything can play out here, whether the TA is accepted or rejected.
DC, thanks for the reply. I was just spitballing ideas to make reserve better. The reason why I suggested making long call reserves available quicker than short call reserves is to make the long call to short call conversion a much larger penalty to the company than one hour of pay because that penalty isn't working at all.
If the company could use long calls faster than short calls, they likely wouldn't convert long calls to short call all that often.
As far as the scenario you paint with 10 hour short call, let me throw out a different way of looking at this. If one is on short call, s/he can't really sit at home if s/he lives in:
Pittsburgh for DCA
San Diego for LAX
Reno for SFO
etc
If there were a 10 hour short call, those same people could drive to base in much less than 7 hours.
In addition, there's always FedEx/UPS jumpseating to get to base overnight. I've done that before when living in SAT and commuting to reserve in DCA. It sucked but my was active military so not much choice in the commute.
If the response time is 12 hours for both short and long call, there's very little disincentive for the company to convert long to short call. That's the big problem that I see with making them the same.
I do NOT want to give up the 10 AM first day of reserve. The company will go after that hard; I don't see any reason to give that up ever.
I'm just tossing out ideas to improve reserve. If someone takes my crude ideas and makes them more acceptable to both the pilots and the company, perhaps changes can be made. We can make a lot of suggestions but if the company's not going to agree to them, we're just dreaming of things that will never be.
Last question. I haven't looked at other airlines' reserve rules. Anyone want to compare United's reserve with other airlines?
Andy,
Nothing wrong with spitballing, that's how solutions get started.
A short call of 10 hours doesn't exactly work in "covering" the operation. We gave up 30 mins in the UPA for reporting once on SC.
And after Buffalo and FAR117 I wouldn't recommend to anyone to commute on FedEx/UPS for an early morning departure as I gave in my scenario. Commute on a red eye to fly immediately a trip? How does one certify FFD for that and be legal?
To solve the willy nilly conversion to SC that the crew desk currently uses, yes either the financial pain needs to be increased, a max limit of conversions allowed(like we had before in the UAL contract) or just have pure SC lines (with enough reserves on SC so as not to convert the LC folks except in extreme irrops ) which already is in the contract.
I'm certain that there can be many good ideas that could be put forward if given the opportunity.
Still trying to figure out how 117 would ever let the company mandate we check our schedules on a day off. So the 10 am on day one seems here to stay. Not sure we could negotiate that away if we wanted too...
DC