Originally Posted by
sailingfun
There are a variety of reasons for this. Some have to do with special airport and aircrew requirements. Others have to due with automation and the fact that next day trips are worked manually.
The key reason however is to provide a better quality of life for reserve pilots. It certainly would be possible to set up a move up system like the flight attendants have that could run the day prior and even same day as trips drop into open time. It will however result in absolute crap for reserve pilots in terms of trip quality. Every change in how we assign trips has ramifications that are different for each seniority segment. I don't ever plan on being on reserve again but don't mind granting this benefit to reserve pilots.
I agree that you have the rationale figured out.
However, let's consider that the current system doesn't respect seniority in determining
which Reserve pilot gets
what trip, once it's steered their way, so this doesn't make their life predictably better. IOW, the coverage violates seniority for the Regular pilots, then it violates it again wihtin the available Resrve pilot group.
I think I would be more comfortable if the Reserve piltos had a better system for allowing people to get (or decline) the available flying IAW their seniority, had a better system for distributing SC's, had a ultra-LC option, rewarded people for greater availability, and didn't submit them to the insult of sitting next to nother person getting paid more credit for the very same rotation.
Assuming this could be set in place, then you could give Regular pilots access to the available open time, to improve
their lot.
Steering better trips to junior pilots so that Reserve is bearable is a band-aid on a concessionary Reserve system, and is punitive to the senior guys. Two wrongs failing to make a right.