I don't understand why these guys continue to pick up these pairings. The only thing that will discourage this kind of behavior is public humilation. While that sounds rough, that is basically what is done in Anchorage. I wish the union would post names along with the disputed pairings in their emails. It is much more visible than just the pairing. Captains should educate these individuals on why flying these trips will make bad trips a part of our life indefinitely. Of course we have captains flying these as well, and when the time is right, the FO could ask the captain why he is flying DPs? This would involve some tact, but it shouldn't be a big deal. Or maybe just treat him as a leper and eat and drink by himself.

WE COULD FIX THESE PAIRINGS THIS MONTH! Want to know how? If you read our latest O'gram, you read about the difficulties in dropping or moving R days. I am a MEM MD-11 FO and I can tell you that I have not been able to drop or move an R day all month, and I have tried plenty of times. It is easy to tell why. The company has drastically reduced the number of reserve lines. We usually have less than 10 people on RA or RB now. Of course some of these 10 have been assigned longer trips and aren't available or some are sick or military duty. They do this for the obvious reasons, to increase reserve utilization, and primarily to add more pilots to fly trips. This way they can take the 40-50 less pilots that were sitting reserve and put them on lines or VTOs. They can cut BLG even more when they spread it out to more people. So the bottom line is if YOU don't fly DPs (which there are a ton of them this month) they will not have enough reserves to fly them plus sick calls and extras. They will have to make draft calls which they don't like to make. Easy enough?