Originally Posted by REF 5

Couple of things when it comes to red eyes. They are inefficient. Period. No matter how you slice it. Before part 117, airlines did push it to the edge. Look at the FA's pairings. Not much different before 117. Years ago I did red eyes on a four day at the end or in the middle of the pairings at my previous airline. All of them sucked. They paid crap. Nobody liked flying them except those who could put up with it. Many of them magically ended up in opentime or assigned to reserve's. At least 117 took into account WOCL. The fact they are going very senior tells you a lot. If you like a lot of soft pay and you commute, nothing beats it. Not my cup of tea these days but it seems to work for a segment of the pilot group. I could remember an airline based on the west coast that started all their trips with a redeye. It paid crap. Again, this was before part 117. Bottom line, their are many ways to build a pairing with a red eye. Rumor is once the red eye RAP's come on line they may change how the red eye pairings are built. We'll see. When we started doing red eyes a few months ago, it was not only a change on the op side of things, it changed how SWA looks at flowing the network. Be careful letting the company build red eye pairings as a buffet vs strict controls. Domestic red eyes will never be efficient through a crew planning point of view. If they try, those pairings will fail. As far as west domiciles not doing the East Coast or Atlantic times zone stuff, that was an issue last decade that began to rear its ugly head when DPOS was building some insanely crazy pairings with no regard for time zone changes at all. Their was enough p2p flying to go around and keep the block per duty period high enough to make it work as far as keeping everyone within a time zone or two and those trips paid well. Now with the network changing as much as it has(red eyes, longer stage lengths, day of the week flying, more intentional connections) the whole schedule planning of the CBA is beginning to not look as good as it was did based on pure p2p operation. The only way to change the displacement's is to make it contractually harder to do so. Openers don't begin at the earliest until 2027. Hopefully new hires will be help fill some of these vacancies and reduce displacements.