Originally Posted by
poorflyer
Just one data point. I was hired winter ‘22 into EWR 737 and it took me about 8 months from new hire class to get a junior line, and now I’m 42% in base and equipment holding most weekends off. I think 8 months is slightly longer than usual just because of the Ukraine situation happening right before summer and slowing down hiring a bit around then. Reserve is not great but there’s techniques to use to get more days off and a decent schedule. I was able to have 14-16 days off in the heat of summer using aggressive pickup on my reserve stretch minus one day, so the company couldn’t really use me on my last day of reserve.
And there may be a "benefit" at UAL (agressive pickup, whatever that is) compared to DAL reserve, at DAL you can "request" a trip, but it's solely at the schedulers discretion and they typically assign trips that match days available first. There is no mechanism to force skeds to assign you a trip from open time. They can ignore you up to a point, and tend to load share the reserve pool between days available and in terms of "buckets" comparing how much you've already been assigned before honoring your request for a trip.