With some variations on this on augmented flights:

8 hours in a day, 30 hours in 7 days, 100 hours in a month, and 1000 hours in a year, which works out to be 82 hours a month average max.

 

Bob Crandall on the current mess:

"Crandall said American might be forced to go to court again. “It is perfectly obvious that this is a job action by the pilots,” Crandall told the AP. “I think it’s childish, it’s self-defeating and it’s harmful to the company and to other employees.”

 

Ok.But, How many PAY-CUTS, benefit cuts, pension terminations, furlough, displacements, and base closures (now forced to commute) have you endured in the last 15 years?

 

Again "the courts" corporate Americas comfort blanket!!
When things don't go their way, an injunction or two will ease the corporate pain....Pathetic..

 

One of the things that writeup by the FO highlighted was how cumbersome the overall AA operation is:

From poorly managed and run mx operations, to even requiring a key and vest to go down the jetbridge (really??), running an operation that cumbersome so razor thin and applying some stress to it is just asking for the wheels to fall off the bus.

 

I put the failures squarely in AMR management's corner. For example, what company makes the largest aircraft order in history (on the order of $38B) then 4 months later declares bankruptcy???

AMR Corporation Announces Largest Aircraft Order in History With Boeing and Airbus - Jul 20, 2011

American Airlines Parent AMR Files for Bankruptcy as Horton Is Named CEO - Bloomberg

It's absolutely inane. And I will recognize smart management teams - I think Richard Anderson at Delta is a brilliant CEO at Delta and has made a tremendous turnaround of the airline, just look at the stats.

I think American pilots are true professionals, but they have been poorly served by this management team.

 

2 major pay cuts because of acquisitions. One of the acquisitions removed a local hq.

I have been more or less commuting for ten years.

Pension - I wish, 401k benefits have been altered several times over the past 15 years.

General benefits seem to get worse every year.

But I absolutely love what I do and who I work for.

Most of America has been going through benefits reduction for the past ten years. Pensions are non existent in my industry. Not even sure what industry still offers them.

 

Well, Ol' Bob is no stranger to malfeasance. He should know!

At some point, you can whip the enthusiasm right out of the horse. It takes a pretty dense jockey not to recognize it.

 

Jabone,

To add to what 80 said about federal limits.. he listed flight time restrictions. We are limited to 15 hour duty days and must have 24 hours off in a 7 day period. The 24 hours doesn't have to be at home ie a hotel room in Mogadishu will suffice. All major airlines (with AMR as an exception?) schedule their pilots less to avoid fatigue.

 

Pilots think in terms of flight hours, not work hours, because that's how we get paid. 66 flight hours could be anywhere up to double that time (or more; I personally get paid 3.5 hours for a full day's training at the schoolhouse, for example). It's a confusing system if you don't live with it. It also sounds great... until the unpaid hours at work are considered. The public, who don't realize that we don't get paid for all our work hours, thinks we're living the life of Riley. This is the fiftieth or eightieth time I've tried to explain this to people who've asked, so you can imagine that it gets tiresome. Especially when those you've explained it to end up walking away with a bemused look, and you know they're going to go right back to how they were thinking before. I don't blame them, but it starts to wear thin on me the 20th or 30th time that happens. What should you, a consumer, know about flying on AA for the next few weeks? That you're taking a gamble on getting where you want to go when you want to go there. That's just true, and it will be true for any airline when you get toward the end-game of contract negotiation.