Originally Posted by tonsterboy5

Uncle Sam IS paying for salary right now that’s public information. They are not flying the lineholders over minimum because it makes no sense when Uncle Sam is essentially paying to keep everyone on the book so the easiest way to keep everyone at 76 hours of pay is to give all lineholders 15ish days off and 50-60 hours of flying and pay for a bunch of reserves to sit around at 76 hours on the government dime. Once Uncle Sam stops giving free money it will make more sense for the company to condense the flying so everyone works 18 days and 85 hours.

Let’s just say there are 1000 pilots right now with Uncle Sam paying the bill and you must keep all 1000 pilots. The airline is given 15000 hours of flying or 30000 man hours. That’s 30 hours split evenly, but let cut out 30% for reserves so we have 700 pilots to cover 30000 man hours or 42.9 hours per line holder. The company has no issues right now paying each pilot to only fly 43 hours because Uncle Sam is really paying for it.

next month they won’t have the luxury of Uncle Sam so they are going to cut as much as they can. They can effectively cut down to 500 pilots the 350 line holders at 86 hours each with some reserves left at 76 hours to fill in the gaps.

right now at 1000 pilots @76 hours its 76000 hours of pay for 30000 hours of labor.

if they furlough half it will be 350 line holders at 86 which is 30100 hour of pay plus 150 reserves at 76 hours or another 11400 hour
So with furloughs the total hours paid will be close to 41500 hours

this is why it benefit the company to make the flying as efficient as possible and work the remaining Pilots as much as possible, expect full duty days, min days off and as much credit as they can physically cram into lineholder as possible