Originally Posted by LBFO79

I don't believe premium will be coming back to anything close to level seen prior to this year. It will actually get worse.

we have a lot of factors that drive down our premium opportunities. And downward drivers are coming. Here are some of these things I'm speaking of,

Reassignments are often preferred over offering premium because reassigning a pilot means they only pay 50% of the limited flights that are considered AF (reassignment) flying. There is nonsoft pay being paid as premium

IMAX encourages pilots to want straight time (not premium) over PM trips, when they are in the middle of an imax run.

Zero Time Lines grant some pilots lines with 0 hours guarantee. The company is learning to loce this, because many of these pilots are able to gobble up large chunks of the already limited open time available. Now you are left with extremely high reserve levels covers 0 open trips, even in large bid statuses. They have more than enough reserves to cover even bad-weather days too. Not sure why the union loves these zero time lines. It benefits very few pilots, but it is at the expense of every other pilot who have higher forced line values and less premium trips.

Like I said, it will get worse too...

The new reserve system that is being programmed will be even more efficient for AA, resulting in less premium offerings, since the reserves will cover more of the already limited open time.

The new RO assignment rules will allow pilots in RO to cover a whole lot more flying hours from open time. This will be the biggest killer of premium time.

This why APAs strategy for negotiating variable premium and selling it to our pilots as a win....was insulting. It should have been obvious since United airlines was trying to (and successfully did) move to a system that offers more guaranteed premium opportunities at higher than 150%. Delta and United have it much better. We are last in this category, like most of our contract.