When discussing the QOL issues at envoy, it’s not about comparing airline life against being shot at in a war zone, we all know they aren’t even comparable, #firstworldproblems. What it IS about is in comparison to what our QOL used to be, and in relation to other regionals.

I’ve been at envoy for well over a decade. When I was hired on, the bid packets had a good mix of day trip, two day back to backs, three, and four day trips. Most of the four day trips were commutable on one or both ends. The three day trips were 18-19 days off and high time. The two day trips would allow locals to be home every day. I haven’t seen schedules like that in quite a while, and the ability for locals and commuters to maximize their time at home has been drastically curtailed. Now, it’s almost all four day trips, all the time. As a commuter, instead of three days off at home, you have to spend your last day off traveling to work, and your first day off traveling back home when the sequences don’t have start and end times conducive to commuting. That effectively reduces you to one day off, and when our lines were 4 on, 2 off for an extended period of time, it was simply becoming unbearable for many commuters because they were never home. I’m not kidding when I say marriages were getting strained, and people were missing their kids growing up.

Running 40% of a base on reserve was and is asinine. Other regionals run maybe 10-15% last I saw, AND don’t have ready reserve.

The inability to get PVD’s or even PO’s to attend things like funerals was a slap in the face as human beings, and up until recently they were impossible to get.

Getting junior manned twice in one month on reserve when you only have 11 days off, and then having scheduling deny any return days you put in for was a sham, especially if they tried to call a multi-day extension “one JM.”

These are just a few of the examples of how our QOL has been degraded over the years in terms of variety of schedules, commutability, time free from duty at home, and how we have been treated in general. I could produce many more, but I think it’s sufficient to say that anyone around my seniority could tell you that our QOL is nothing compared what it used to be. There is no reason for our schedules to be this bad, except for the fact the “new US Airways” doesnt care about how their assignment of regional flying affects things like our QOL. In other words, life at a regional doesn’t have to suck, because I’ve personally seen it much better. People getting hired now think this is normal because they haven’t known anything different, and think the old geezers are just whining and complaining.