Originally Posted by
three1five
West coast NB FO here. In 6 months of reserve, I averaged 2-3 short calls per month. I sat field standby twice in 6 months. Almost all my reserve days were unused long call. I even went an entire month without flying. I never was assigned to fly off short call or FSB. Most of my reserve work blocks, I commuted in on day 1 and commuted home on the last day after getting auto released at 1000. Usually scheduling would agree to cut me loose an hour or so early on the last day.
I recognize that many have different reserve experiences than mine, but my reserve experience wasn’t bad and if I lived in base it would have been quite pleasant. Many other FOs in my base had similar experiences to mine, but don’t seem to post about it much on the internet. I spent a month on reserve in a different base and flew 16 of 18 days, so some of this may be base dependent.
As a lineholder I’m getting 85-90 hr lines with 14 days off. I am generally able to make minor modifications to schedule via trip trades.
We do have some horrible trips for sure, stuff like two leg 1-days with 12 hours in between legs (spent at a hotel) that credits 5:00. Or redeyes followed by a day sleep followed by two legs. But most of the line trips are reasonable.
United’s reserve rules are by far the worst of all the legacies. But United’s reserve rules are significantly better than the reserve rules at the regional I came from.
Personally I’d think a lot about seniority when considering bailing from one legacy to another.
Respectfully, it looks like you haven't flown reserve through the summer months. My reserve experience on the west coast was the exact opposite. Scheduled above the 95 hour buffer, had HDO's taken away, almost every trip had a red-eye/dayover, field standby's, short-calls on last day of reserve block, etc.
Our rules are really bad (worse than the regional I used to fly for) but they don't use them to their fullest extent until something bad happens or they just get over-scheduled. That leads a lot of people to believe that the rules aren't that bad because they either haven't flown during hectic times or they just got lucky and didn't get the full experience of our crappy rules.
Everyone has their unique perspectives, but a good measure of how the 15,000 pilots feel about our reserve rules is that we have unfilled Captain vacancies in almost every base.