Originally Posted by
BusCapt
Have had several spirit pilots in the jumpseat recently. It sounds like they have made the place quite tolerable from a schedule standpoint. The last jumpseater was fairly junior, but was able to pick up or drop down to whatever credit he wanted. Lots of scheduling flexibility.
I was curious to how this was achieved. It sounds (and I'm summarizing a fairly long and detailed conversation) that the pilot group showed tremendous backbone and solidarity in fighting for their QOL improvements and scheduling language. They did not have "rats" (his words, not mine) picking up open time trips, especially during contract negotiations. They were organized, motivated, and had some modicum of self respect as a work-group. In all, it appears that they didn't make very good victims. They sounded a lot more like intelligent professionals that demanded and fought for a good work-life balance.
If anyone disagrees with my take on this, then I'd be interested to hear. I've only been at two airlines (20 years total) and am still fairly green to the industry.
Spirit guy here... this is arguable... we have fabulous flexibility and get a lot of time off... HOWEVER there were imo some concessions in the QOL on this latest contract. The big IF now is how will everything change when PBS is implemented. ALPA and NK have a joint group operating under an LOA to have PBS implemented within a year from DOS. Good news is PBS comes with improved soft time... trip rig etc....bad news is at this point we have no idea how it will affect pairing construction and the red/green board (our system for being able to drop straight). It passed by 70% so overall your getting a pretty good idea. As far as rats goes remember the company filed suit against us for an apparent job action against the operation. There were people out for themselves but for the most part we were tired of the lack of progress and felt that the NMB was our worst enemy to achieve what we wanted. Wish you guys well in the next round, I believe in 3 years at NK we’ll be in for another fistfight although we’re certainky MUCH closer to our ultimate goals than we were 10 months ago. For the record I barely fly in the summer so I can be a dad and have no trouble dropping down to 20-22 days off a month.