Originally Posted by
FriendlyPilot
If you can get within 5% of legacy payrates, that's great. Take it. It is widely known that Premium revenue and International subsidizes our narrowbody payrates at United, which will be hard to match in these times, to be honest.
I think there is a running myth that other airlines have no "schedule flexibility". At United I have only flown one trip that was on my original schedule for both May and June and 4 of my trips were all picked up from open time or traded from trips I originally bid. I am in the bottom half of my base as well. Sure we have some junior pilots that get redeye flights that fly over a weekend that can't just drop every trip into open time, but we have a very robust trips trading/drop system. We do not have a 100% "can drop" policy, since the airline just can't have every pilot drop all their Christmas trips etc.
I just checked for the rest of June on the Airbus, probably a similar sized fleet to Frontier, and we have 256 trips that are in open time for Captains for the rest of the month. These trips are predominantly open because of trip drops. Only 14 of them have a redeye segment in them. Anyone that has a trip they don't want has a lot of choice of trips to trade into.
Its great that you have a lot of QOL and trading flex, but other airlines do as well. None of us are "stuck" in our monthly trips. This perspective is good to know so that your management doesn't overstate other parts of your contract so that they can short you on take home pay.
you just nailed the coffin of one of the QOL items.
at F9 depending on the month we can drop until a minimum credit of around 60? For some months and less for others without any repercussions except loss of pay from MMG.
as a reserve pilot we also have the option of moving days around on a grid which shows the availability of days that the company needs a minimum of in each of our bid periods.
in my opinion one of our highest benefit items is anything above 82 hours of credit in a month gets a 25% pay override. But considering we cap our premium at around 150% which never comes available. It is a moot point to brag about.
please continue to keep an eye here for any claims we have to superior QOL items. To discredit any lies we believe with regards to our schedule flexibility and QOL items.
Some would argue we have peak QOL due to the day trips model being so prominent but this is purely relative as you must live in base within 1 hour drive to really benefit from this.
vacation days is our most flexible feature but I’m not sure I’m best to speak of the flexibility in credit/days you can have off or increase value to the end of the year depending on situation.