Penalties discourage the company from taking shortcuts to fix their shortcomings. If we removed these penalties, the company would take more shortcuts without recourse, and squeeze more efficiency out of the pilot population as a whole. We simply should never, ever concede on that front, and the same could have been said about batch size arguments.

Have you ever had the discussion with a new hire complaining about not being able to pickup over vacation or APDs? The company would love that, but it's the union that doesn't allow it, because we are our own worst enemy. If you let pilots fly more, with more freebie scheduling efficiencies, greenslips go down, reroutes go down, reserve manning goes down, hiring goes down, but total company block hours flown remain the same. None of this would be good for us. Keep the guardrails in place. Look at the general forum yearly compensation thread and note how our yearly block hours compare to other airline's block hours, and ask yourself if you want to give any inch of that away.


Let's say you're at the board meeting discussing how to prevent next summer's meltdowns and two options are presented: 1) Convince the union to concede auto-accepts and robo-call limitations or 2) Pre-emptively assign more silver slips, VAS, and premium reserve days, and staff reserves enough so that they're actually waiting on reserve to cover problem trips and not just used to pick up left over bid packet trips from open time.

Which is better for us, big picture? Which leaves us with better QOL? Which is better aligned with the point of a union?