The reserve system was designed to use the reserves efficiently. If you look around the industry there are two ways to increase efficiency, one is to cram more time on regular line holders, decrease or eliminate duty rigs and have an inefficient reserve system. The other is to maintain the quality of life for regular line holders and use the reserves more efficiently. In order to use reserves more efficiently you need to spread the flying out. Under a true seniority system (like we used to have) some reserves would time out while others would barely fly. The reserve system was designed so that pilots would fly on reserve about 12-14 days a month in a properly staffed category and that is pretty much what happens when you are not overstaffed. Add in short calls and your 18 days of on call (it used to be either 19 or 20 back in the day) will get used up.

Why be concerned about efficiency? Basically, carriers like Airtran, Jet Blue and Southwest that were highly efficient were cleaning our clocks. We could not compete head to head with them and eventually had to abandon routes either for good or to lower cost connection carriers. You can't lose money on every flight and make up for it in volume. So you either need to compete on efficiency or in other items like pay or work rules. The days of Delta competing head to head on a route and just charging more money than a competitor went out in the late 90's. Those days are not coming back. If you look now, we are pushing Airtran out of Atlanta and Southwest out of Salt Lake, we are gaining back some of what we lost. The increased narrow body flying from this bid is coming at the expense of our connection carriers. Efficiency has its benefits.

The main complaint with the reserve system is from commuters. Back in the stone age when I was hired, every reserve day (and we had more on call days) was a short call day, you had two short call windows one around 9 am and one around 6 pm. Few even considered commuting to reserve. Eventually, our reserve system improved so much, that many pilots considered commuting to reserve an option. When we changed the reserve system to the present system, it decreased the number of reserve pilots by more than half. That means each pilot, on average, spends less time on reserve in their career, but they can't expect to consistently be able to commute to reserve and sit at home all month like before. You can commute to reserve but it is hard.

In the next contract, we expect to add more money into our total compensation, but eventually that increase in total compensation will be a finite amount. If we spend a bunch of that money on making reserve commuter friendly, then there will be a lot less to add to pay rates, vacation, retirement or anything else you want. That is where the pilot group and by proxy the MEC will have to make hard choices.

So the reserve system is designed to be efficient so that we can compete in the marketplace and have more money available for pay, retirement, etc. The pilots may want to put extra money into reserves, but don't pretend that it will not have a cost somewhere else. When we changed the reserve system in Letter 46, we still had the highest pay rates in the industry and the best duty rigs, partly due to our efficient scheduling system. If we had not changed reserve, then we would have had less money to put into pay and work rules. Even in bankruptcy, we were able to keep all of our duty rigs because our efficiency was so high.

Some consider commuting to reserve a choice, some consider it a necessity. That is an issue the pilot group will have to answer in the next contract.