Originally Posted by
GhettoJet
Reserve utilization was a major giveback. My understanding - and it may be incorrect as no one has seen the actual language - is that they have gained the ability to assign reserve flying out of seniority order in buckets based on days of availability. That will dramatically decrease the levels at which they have to staff reserves, decreasing the # of pilots needed to staff the operation. Sick accrual is still dismal, and there's nothing that prevents the company from continuing to use red/redder to essentially prevent lineholders from adjusting their schedules. On top of that, they have four months of the year where they can flex the max ALV to 86 or 90 hours (have a nice summer, senior lineholders!) People are acting like this is a win on the reassignment side...it may or may not be, depending on whether management sees the previous items as paying for premium for those reassignments. It's probably going to disincentivize D0 based reassignments to an extent, but not as much as the yes voters think it will. Overall, it's lipstick on the pig of a poor QOL bankruptcy contract.
I never spent much time here until our PHL council sent out a blast recommending that our junior pilots consider leaving AA to come to DAL; I wanted to see what was behind it. Honestly, it was probably good advice and this AIP proves it.
Before you really get bummed, you should know that:
The DAL reserve system does essentially the same thing. It has a days-of-availability system that is divided up into buckets based on how much "reserve credit" you have done. No dedicated short call or long call, but SC is somewhat limited and does have a leveling mechanism. OTOH, reserve premium time is a thing, and people do quite well at it since it mostly goes above the reserve guarantee. 18 hour callout for LC, assignments up to 2 days out and automatic release 24 hours prior to report were pretty big improvements, though.
Our schedule adjustment system like swaps, drops and so on are based on reserve availability, and it's actually a numeric value that that is generated via the contract, but in short categories, your only option is to look for days that are "worse" or use a limited number of "silver bullets". The upside is that it's all automated, so there's very little in the way of scheduler drama until you're close in to report time (a couple days).
The DAL sick back in "use it or lose it". There is a VERY slow accumulator, where excess sick time can be placed into a disability bank, but even at max accumulation, it's worth a few months of time at most.
Our previous reroute language was a trainwreck, and was next to impossible to figure out if you got paid correctly (if any extra was due at all) without sending in a report to the scheduling committee. I'm not sure a cut and paste of our new system would necessarily the right answer for a different operator.