As far as I can tell, yeah. They've been completely opaque about it, like Vantablack. Every month they announce offering leave, pushing for Voluntary Time Off (which sounds akin to zero hour lines or whatever other companies call it) offering no pay but covering insurance/benefits. Then the paid time off, which is 50 hours (but you're on the hook for your portion of insurance/benefits). However they never say how many leaves they're willing to offer, for how long, in which seat, which domiciles, which aircraft. About halfway into the PBS bidding window, people start to get locked out of PBS and active bidders can see names crossed off the domicile seniority list. We also have a list of how many expected lines and reserve lines will be in each domicile and seat, and when they award leave then the projected total of reserve lines decreases. At one point we received a company email stating they haven't been able to disclose how many VTO or PTO due to "IT limitations" or some nonsense.

Anyway. We get no peek under the hood, and the only way to know is by seeing which bases had their forecasted reserve lines decreased. For example, if an overstaffed base like DTW had 50 reserves and then a few days later shows 20, then we can assume 30 people were awarded leave. What we can't gather is if they received paid leave, unpaid leave, if it was for 1 month or 6, etc etc. And it changes from month to month. For example in my base, 1 FO was given leave last month (no clue what type) but no CA or FA was given any. For January, like 14 leaves were given out, but also no real clue. In the early days of the MOU, they were granting unpaid leave for up to 6 months, so if someone's name remained crossed out in PBS month after month, you could sorta guess they were on VTO. For the upcoming month, everyone came back but then they awarded a bunch of leave again. Some were those long-term VTO folk but others were people I hadn't seen on leave yet. So yeah, opaque. Every month when they beg, they're adamant about VTO being awarded and then, possibly, PTO. So I'm assuming mostly VTO. The few captains I've met that took some form of leave were all VTO.

Yeah it'll be interesting. Some groups had a little more BOHICA than others. So much precipitousness right now. WN teetering on the edge, AA too, B6 propped up with a short term no-furlough clause. Then you have DL which negotiated late in the year and seemed to get a deal for all of 2021. Everyone seemed so focused on making it to October 2020 and ignored the "beyond." Undoubtedly managements all around will use a downturn to force substandard agreements. And I'm sure our not-a-union will keep doing their not-a-union shenanigans.