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Originally Posted by Montcalm (Post 3668723)

This guy gets it.

Not really. It's a way to keep guys from burning it in their last few years.

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Originally Posted by OpieTaylor (Post 3668357)

My point is, it’s a weighed average. Does Delta have a no questions asked 1 flight commuter policy? The year two AA FO NB rate is higher than Delta, and AA will cash out sick time, for 200k at retirement. AA will pay 4K for a TDY assignment.

I don’t think you’ll find a post of me advocating to be dead weight, and don’t think anyone has ever advocated for that.

Southwest doesn’t even get paid by the hour, my point was, I don’t plan on obtaining a PHD in every company and the nuances of how they operate with regards to their contract and claiming my weighted average of importance is more important than yours and I calculated it at a higher cost the company according to me. Then rubber stamping a “1up”.

I admitted AA missed, I don’t have control over how are why and never justified a miss is palatable because we don’t need to “1up”.

I guess your arguinging if they didn’t miss it still wasn’t a 1up?

At the end of the day it sounds like Delta makes all their money with a “GS” which I am not familiar with, but sounds like buying you off a trip and and paying you premium for the new trip. I am not sure if they do that in straight seniority or if a pilot has those days as off days then they can skip the seniority of a conflict.

AA contract allows the company to conflict you and pay you for both, but it comes after just giving it to a pilot who has those days off, and there is always someone with the days off.

Also it seems as though Delta shares “GS” where you get a second turn after everyone has had a chance at 1 turn, and AA is seniority order where you don’t get any turns unless pilots senior to you abstain. Which one is “1up” is largely dependent on seniority.

At Delta, a "GS" ("Green slip") is a trip that the company chooses to cover from a list of pilots who have volunteered for premium open time. It pays 200%. They are assigned in seniority order, from an app that calls you. If you're eligible, you get a call, then check the app and indicate if you want to do it or not. The most senior pilot to accept gets it. Once you've had #1 for the month, every other eligible and legal pilot for the next one available gets a chance before you. Same goes for #2, #3, etc, but it's not uncommon to see people get several a month if they were the only available and legal pilot for that trip.

We can also take a GS on a day a trip was dropped by the company, for example, taken for IOE, which pays 100% for the dropped trip plus 200% for the GS (triple dip).

I don't think it's accurate to say all Delta pilots make a significant portion of our income from GS because I don't think a majority of pilots play the GS lottery. Also, they're based on staffing being tight. When staffing catches up, the GS stop flowing. Most of our pay comes from the actual rates, but also a lot of soft pay and credits in our contract. Profit sharing is also significant, which accumulates all year and is paid on Feb 14. It could be anything between 5% and 20% of your year's gross, depending on how the company did. Right now, mid year, they have already surpassed last years profit sharing pool, which paid about 7% for pilots.

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Originally Posted by Tropical (Post 3668866)

I like this method. Delta does it right. This keeps the PM mongers from bidding and dropping Caribbean turns only to pick them back up again in PM... every.... other.... day.... of... the... week. Good on you guys.

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Originally Posted by TankerDriver (Post 3668876)

Actually, there is a way to do that here. They call it "trip parking". In our trip swap system, you can designate "friends" and trade trips back and forth. So you would "park" a trip on a friend's schedule, which gets you below the threshold to pick up another trip. Your friend drops a payback day on the trip and gets paid for it, it drops back into open time. You pick the trip up again via whits slip, then trade it back to your friend. He drops the same trip with a PB day, and you pick it up again... so on. A couple pilots last year credited over 1000 hours in a month doing this, but that's holy grail stuff, everything would have to align perfectly

Payback Days are earned if you take a GS on reserve on an off day. This is what we call "rolling thunder". You can only do it in busy low staffing months (summer) and you have to be senior. You bid reserve, GS on off days, put the PB days on your next reserve day, which becomes off days, then GS on those days. By the end of the month you have a crap ton of PB days plus all reserve GS pay 100% above guarantee, so you could credit way above 100 hours on reserve, and then use the PB days later as said above.

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Originally Posted by Tropical (Post 3668895)

HAHA... well then take back everything I just said about Delta...in all seriousness; there are always going to be loopholes and ways to work the system anywhere.

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Originally Posted by Tropical (Post 3668895)

This isn't 100% trip parking, since the trip does have to make a pass through open time. Because of that, there is always a chance someone senior with a generic request grabs the trip and blows up your program,

Back in the day, you could just park it on someone else's schedule with the pilot to pilot swap system. But, of course, there were some that were doing things that were pretty obnoxious and called attention to what they were doing. Because of that, there are now restrictions that force a trip picked up via pilot to pilot swap to pass through open time before it goes back to the person that it originated from.

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Originally Posted by TankerDriver (Post 3668901)

HAHA... well then take back everything I just said about Delta...in all seriousness; there are always going to be loopholes and ways to work the system anywhere.

To be fair, "trip parking" is all about exchanging prior work (Payback Days from a reserve GS with no further on-call Reserve days left in a month), for Cash. It's pretty uncommon in the big picture, and that trip must still go though PCS Open Time (Pilot Change Schedule, the contractual computer system which assigns/changes trips) to get it back, so it's not as easy as it sounds to just get the trip back. There was ONE, single WB FO last year who credited 999:32, which is a record which shall never, ever be approached again, not even by half. it was only possible in a perfect storm of circumstances by a pilot who worked the system literally all year long, in the most undermanned year in history, and cashed in all his PB days (again, from prior work) in one month after lining up fellow FO's all year for the "big short" in dozens of 'transactions'. There was also a WB Captain who did a similar thing and credited about 700 hours in one month. Honestly, I didn't believe it was even possible to get over 300-350 until seeing the timecard screenshot. But again, that was such a statistical outlier in a perfect storm that cannot be considered in the same universe as "the norm".

There are always pilots who figure out a way to work the system, and make bank. But it's not consistent or guaranteed by any stretch. In normal times, there are pilots who go years without getting a single GS. But when they are flowing, DL's GS system does an excellent job of leveling out the playing field so everyone gets a shot in seniority order. And again, the GS train is slowing as manning normalizes. It will never stop fully, but it's still running above normal speed for now.