The regional I came from had them, off and on. I never had any interest in working them but I liked it when we had them. Variety is almost always a good thing. When we had them, they were bid as a line schedule for the month and those schedules went senior which meant other schedules that I wanted went more junior.

Why did they go senior? They allowed those that got them significantly more time at home and fly a schedule of 30ish hours and getting paid about 75ish ours for the month.

Why were they good to have even if you didn’t want them? As said above, variety is a good thing. But also their existence removed undesirably flying from the build of other sequences making other sequences more efficient and pay better and have longer layovers… so we all benefited from it.

Why did they go away? Their existence activated or allowed pilots to exploit holes in the contract. The union would beg pilots to not “x, y, or z” because there was nothing stopping the company from not offering the stand ups. The pilots abused the situation anyway.


My take, with the right rules in place it’s good for everyone.