Originally Posted by nunyabiz

You are right that over half our pilot force wasn’t here in 2015. Let’s hope we don’t make the same mistake our predecessors did. Sadly I agree with you that most have chosen dollars over QOL life though and that is even more evident by our “focused negotiations”. How’s that going for us?

There are a few exaggerations in KC’s post but not by much.

Yes, we have R24 lines (24hr callout) but we all know those aren’t being used as originally intended. Check any schedule for someone with R24 and you’ll wanna throw up all over yourself. Hotel standby (1.5hr call out) is the norm. If not, the chances are you’ll get assigned a trip fairly far out. Then nothing on day two and another trip on day 3. So you can’t really commute home so you end up at a hotel/Crashpad just as if you had been on short call. Too many single day trips are assigned to R24 pilots and it makes the lines unbearable. I avoid them at all costs. They are not the good deal that they sound.

I also don’t get the 17% income replacement ratio, but I welcome KC to show his math. There is no doubt that the pension is dying though. As it is not inflation protected the worth of the pension today, is NOT what it will be in 10, 20, or 40 years from now.

As to the FAR limit thing, a huge problem is that not enough pilots call in “fatigued” when they really should. You can see a train wreck coming and try to tell CRS “this isn’t gonna work”. They don’t care. They will force you into a fatigue call and then your actions are scrutinized to see if you’ll get paid or not.

I have called in fatigued and I can tell you the very first question that was asked was “when will you be ready to go?” I have no idea! In the meantime as I’m trying to sleep and recover they revise the schedule to be even worse than it was before. We had to complain multiple times until an acceptable solution was found.

The international extension time is why I personally avoid international trips. My spouse counts on me being home when I say I’ll be home. I can’t take the risk that I need to bid around an event by three days just because my trip is international.

I’ll add another head scratcher for me. Is it not true that at other airlines your trip can pass through base and you’re still on the same trip? That’s not the case here. If you touch base the trip is over.

If you have all hub turns (day or night) through your base those are all individual trips. Your pay (and per diem) stop while you are in base. Doing PM hub turns through MEM? That could be up to a 6 hr sit where you aren’t getting paid, no per diem, the “cafeteria” is a joke, and your catering parameters were based on each individual trip so you also don’t get catering. If you flew the exact same trip but turned through IND instead of MEM you would continue to get paid, get per diem, AND get catering. If you want to eat that catering or not is a whole different story.

Ok, now for one thing I do like…kinda. Deadheads and the ability to deviate potentially cutting time off your trip. We also keep all the airline miles so it can mean you get status. Deviating doesn’t come without risks though. If you deviate on the front end you have ZERO protections if something goes sideways. So plan accordingly. Also it often appears that the company goes hunting for flights where the accepted fare is completely unrealistic. That means if you don’t have the deviation bank you may not be able to get there from where you are. There are also a bunch of rules of HOW you can use the bank, which make no sense as to why the company would care, that can really limit you. Finally with the bank, as it stands the funds are no going away but that is under the COVID MOU and could go away at any time unless our new contract solidifies that the current procedures stay.

Probation is a whole different animal here. They company can and will fire you. While I wouldn’t call it fear it does seem like probationary pilots have to tread very very lightly here. I don’t get the impression it’s quite as harsh at the Legacy’s.

I know personally I came here over a Legacy because of how much FedEx had been talked up. That and what I was told about it being commuter friendly. I’ve found that what I was sold is also a “bunch of half truths”.

I didn’t know if I was ready to move to a Legacy base. Sure you can commute to them but it seemed to me that the commuters I knew at other airlines had it much rougher. I do still believe that FedEx is the best option if you’re going to commute. I’d say you should think really hard about it though because in reality FedEx is great if you are a commuter AND live near a large airline hub where you can get cheap, direct flights for your deadheads. Otherwise, a two leg deviation is still a two leg trip. See my thoughts on front end deadheads above.


You can do all the research you want but the simple reality is there is no way you can understand all the ins and outs before deciding. We do have a fair number of pilots who came over from Legacy’s so I’d love to hear what it was they disliked so much over there that made them switch over.

The knock on too many military folks isn’t an anti-military thing. It’s more that you don’t know what you don’t know. The majority of our pilots don’t know our own contract so how can they possibly know others and demand that we have similar items? They see it as life is better than it had been working for Uncle Sam and that’s as far as it goes.