TrinityDawn

The short answer is that we are poorly managed.

The long answer is that there has been a failure of management at multiple levels. Upper management scared off 500+ pilots during and after bankruptcy. We went from 3,200 pilots to around 1,800 today. They cut up and divided our flying so poorly that our schedules became very unproductive. Middle management has put in place schedule "metrics" that must be met for them to approve the bid packet. These metrics have absolutely no bearing on reality, so instead of creating more hard lines and having the normal (10-15%) of the airline on reserve, management would rather have a huge percentage on reserve, and then "keep them from sitting at home being paid" with all the open time they withheld from the monthly line building. Add onto that the closure of multiple bases down to two, when we still have an enormous amount of flying passing through major cities (like the equivalent of 40+ lines of flying in MIA with NO reserves on duty there) and they burn through the reserve list like crazy. The DCE list is almost always zeroed out, and I've seen multiple days recently where they have zero reserves for the next day and 5-6 trips still open after everyone has confirmed for the evening. I've spent the last 3-4 weeks doing 5-6 day trips covering flying in ORD, and I'm DFW based.

In other words, our management doesn't care about QOL, and that's why. At one point in NYC when I was up there, HALF of the 145 CA's in the base were on reserve. If they could put 100% of us on reserve, I'm sure they would.