Originally Posted by
NotMrNiceGuy
I want to take a moment to clarify a couple of things. The first is that I’m not trying to broach this topic for the current round of negotiations. I’m just trying to understand its place in our system historically. I do think it might make sense to address going forward in the next round.
Secondly, I think there has been a bit of false dichotomy regarding the costs and trade offs. When applied to our lines, a continuous TAFB system can be more than a “few shekels”. And it doesn’t apply to per diem alone.
If you go take a look at the April 2026 lines, there is a pure RDU day flying line on the 76. The week is made of front and back end DH’s. There is one week that doesn’t have a BEDH. Total TAFB currently is 322:31. Currently, it pays 94:57. If you didn’t break up the TAFB, it would be 385:42. That would credit 102.85. That’s 7.9 hours for the month. Not including per diem.
The line has 19 days on in a 35 day bid period. The current book comes out with an average daily credit of 5 hours. Compare that with the continuous TAFB pairings and the average credit goes to just over 5.35. That’s competitive with the industry which has an average daily guarantee credit of 5.25 hours.
Lastly, I think there’s a misconception of the tradeoffs. You don’t lose any flexibility regarding swapping schedules. Swapping out legs departing a base and returning to base has been going on in the industry with continuous TAFB pairings for pilots for more than a decade. Mentioned earlier, jetway trades are proffered on a trade board just like they are today. You just select which legs you want to swap or drop and the trade board does its thing. There is no trading shekels for flexibility.
As a matter of fact, it can enhance flexibility as some carriers can let you drop the last leg to base if you can find a pilot that will take the trip from an outstation back to base. That could make commuting to base much easier if you can operate in to work.
Again, just trying to have an honest discussion and see if there’s room for improvement.
Thank you for trying to re-direct the discussion back to your original point. I think you're talking about MEM 767 CA line 1127. So, you're saying that if each series of trips was treated as one continuous trip each week, the TAFB calculation would win out over daily block or MPDP and therefore increase the pay for the trip. The counter to the loss of trip trading flexibility we currently have with a line like that would be accomplished with "jetway trades" or some other version of that.
Be patient as I have some questions since I'm not familiar with how "jetway trades" work.
1. If I get someone to take my last leg back to domicile from my home airport so I can be "done" with my trip and go home, who gets paid for that leg?
2. If there is some other version of this option and I get other pilots to fly specific legs of my trip, does that require me to fly their legs?
3. If I don't have to fly their legs and can just give mine away, how does that affect my pay?
Some other issues to consider. Since each trip day is worth more, we're going to burn more vacation and sick hours when we knock out that week. We also have to knock out the whole week instead of individual trips. This happened in 2006 when we went from a 4:1 trip rig to 3.75:1. Our TAFB trip pay went up to 6.4 CH per day but our vacation/sick was still worth only 6 CH per day.
Regardless of how flexible the "jetway" becomes, there are still going to be a large number of pilots who won't benefit from giving away their last trip leg or getting someone else to swap flights with them. They still have an AM EWR hub-turn into the rising morning sun that they'd love to swap to that easy ATL or STL trip that's in OT. What do you say to them? Finding a willing participant to do some jetway kung fu is a different animal than simply hawking OT and grabbing a better trip that shows up.
Just to play devil's advocate, what motivation is there for the company to make this change? If the exact same flights are operated to the same cities using this current line in April, what benefit is there for the company to change the pay structure so the pilots on this line get about 8 CH more pay for the same work? Is there a potential mutual benefit that would help sell this?
Is there potential for new avenues of "creative scheduling" by the company? If most pilots are still on their current trip when they turn through their base instead of how it works now, does that leave them open to more trip revisions?