Originally Posted by
Excargodog
A lot of ignorance here masquerading as wisdom.
I have actually only dropped completely to zero one (1) time and it wasn’t as a “top 5-10-15” guy
I was in one of the last few classes to go through training prior to hiring stopping for COVID. There was little flying going on and my class and several others waited months for IOE. After that, we were given a line for one month to try to get as much flying in as possible towards consolidation. It wouldn’t have been enough, so I dropped the entire schedule to rebuild a new one from leftover scraps and other peoples dropped trips to get me consolidated because as one of the junior guys not just at NK but in the majors, I sat a lot of reserve and sure didn’t fly many hours for the next 6 months. I did get consolidated in that one month though. Picking up trips at three different bases to do it.
So no, it ain’t just for the top “5-10-15” most senior pilots. You shouldn’t try to talk authoritatively about something you clearly don’t understand.
Got it. You did something, once, at a strange time in the business (COVID) and some outside of the top 15 got drops. And the reserve grid at Spirit is somehow always green, junior pilots drop all their weekend and holiday trips, and the planes just get parked on weekends and holidays unless management wants to pay premium. Incredible! Must be why pilots leave Delta, UAL and FedEx to come to Spirit, it really does sound too good to be true!
It's odd that you had to drop EVERYTHING to zero before rebuilding. Does you FLICA not have a "swap" function?
It's also odd how in most posts you say almost no one uses the FULL ZERO part of DTZ, yet somehow ZERO is critical, can't even be DT10, or DT15, must be ZERO, even though almost no one does that, according to you. And you can't acknowledge that having some kind of limit on the DTZ would push the green grid further down the seniority list for people in the middle or bottom to use before the grids finally go red during the seniority windows? Even other Spirit pilots acknowledge that the more junior guys have "to watch the grid" for when someone else picks up a trip, so they can drop something. That's an acknowledgement that the grids do go red. So instead of allowing the top guys to drop EVERYTHING, without limits, during the opening of the seniority windows, which turns that expensive new Green Grid to Red before it gets further down the list, why not have some limits, at least during the seniority windows, so that more of the group can benefit from that new Green Grid that WE ALL WILL PAY FOR with negotiating capital???