Originally Posted by
hummingbear
I’ll grant you guys that I really like the idea of making RSV so good it goes senior. But if the argument is that no one wants to upgrade below 50% because of how bad the lines are, that’s only a 40% solution. Fixing work rules could, of course, improve the QOL of a junior lineholder, but you can’t totally get rid of the reality that when a very senior FO upgrades into a more senior position, there’s always going to be some loss in QOL. (Someone’s still gotta fly the red-eyes; someone’s gotta do the 30 hour DSM layovers in the winter.) The trade off for that has always been money.
I get your point about money and the ask. I think you're still missing the point that reserve doesn't go junior if it's done right.
We'll always have some twelve-month pilots who will take the first upgrade and run with it, no matter what the QOL hit is. The company is banking on that with this vacancy.
Better reserve rules don't fix the QOL of junior lines. Instead, they provide an alternative to bidding junior lines. For example, a senior FO might take an upgrade into weekends-off reserve over an upgrade spending every Saturday night in GRR, provided that the weekdays don't involve sitting FSB unused every other day, and provided that reserve line had more or similar days off to the junior line full of those four-day weekend GRR trips with the four-hour sit in ORD or IAH before go-home leg.
If better reserve rules entice more middle-seniority pilots to upgrade, then those pilots will take the bulk of the reserve lines. Bottom-seniority upgrades will end up flying the lines with red-eyes, day sleeps, and winter DSMs, because they won't be senior enough to hold reserve.