Originally Posted by
Verdell
A curiosity of mine is that as someone relatively new here, L8/L9 has been around for a long time, and L4 is new in C2019. Yet L4 is waaaay easier to calculate. L4 is also a lot more common.
I'm both surprised that there are not more L8/L9 guru's out there given it's been around a lot longer, and also not surprised since it's more rare (the whole >4 hours thing.) The language around L8/L9 is also more ambiguous (as evidenced by these last few pages.)
Thank you, DALPA, for 23.L.4.
The answer is because reroutes used to be a relatively rare event, and reroute that would trigger L8/L9 even more so.I went 6 years without a single reroute.
Farther back, there used to be no reroute pay at all, and you couldn’t actually be rerouted.
When they squeezed all the trip credit out of the airline in 2018, things started breaking all the time and they started to massively use reroute to operate the airline.
The previous version of L4 was impossible for the line pilot to police and paid in strange ways because of a grievance settlement, if at all. With all the RRs going on, the focus seemed to be on trying to deter the company from their obsession with using RR with premium pay.
L8/9 seemed to operate ok in the few instances it got triggered, so I think all the focus was placed on the L4 issue. The one change they did make is L8/9 pay became stackable with L4, rather than greater of.