We may as well know the contract and apply it where it can be to our advantage. Heard about folks bidding DD's out of thier hometown, deviating from the DH's and expensing 3 days hotel in lieu of DH for both sequences.

You lose the DH bank money, BUT you get 6 days per diem ($273.60 tax-free). And as long as you INTEND to use the hotel, it's completely allowed in the CBA.

Just thought I'd pass that little diddy along.

 

If everyone took the scheduled DH for a month, the compnay would come begging to us to change the system to allow more Flexibilty.

Never happen though.

 

Nice BS, but this problem has been a problem for 6 months. There have already been threads on it ( http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/showthread.php?t=8116 ). It is direct contradiction to the previous chief pilots FCIF of about two years ago where he talked about "catching up with the scheduled pairing". But he was chief pilot when they changed the system. The Union didn't care and yes I did write my rep.

 

The anti-commuter crowd (in management) wants you to live in domicile. They have already considered the cost to the company of fewer "low cost" deviations as a reaction to the new rule. They think it will eventually lead to a higher percentage of us living in Memphis.

Why do they want that? More crewmember availability. The cost of achieving that goal is deemed money well spent.


They may be underestimating the cost of more of us flying as scheduled, but probably not. We are not very united on that and the union, ugh, could care less.

 

This is another area the company has made an assualt on us. Accepted fares. Some of the published accepted fares are based on a perfect world. How many times have you seen the fare of an airline ticket on a non-deviated DH leg cost substantially more than the accepted fare? I've seen it many times. Corp. Travel couldn't buy the ticket at the accepted fare due to various reasons (full discounted seats full, etc.) so they buy it at the higher price. We used to be able to do that also in the form of providing an email with the higher fare from Corp. Travel on the published DH and that became the new accepted fare. Not anymore. The accepted fare is gospel no matter how unrealistic it is. You deviate, you get the $129, not the $265 or whatever it really costs Corp. Travel to buy the ticket.

 

It's just another profit center for the company. They can squeeze out more of the almighty $$ by sticking the commuters with an unrealistic negative bank balance a few months a year. Multiply that by a few thousand commuters and somebody's cashing MBO checks...

 

Yep, and evidently, our union contract enforcement office has just rolled over and played dead on the issue. They are accepting the company's interpretation of "The value of the deviation bank shall equal the value of the scheduled deadhead tickets for trips flown during the bid period..." as being the accepted fare, and not the schedule ticket price that corporate travel actually books for a flight. This is simply not acceptable.
One of our crewmembers in LA is fighting this fight with not only the company's crew travel audit office, but also with our union's contract enforcement office.
If anyone else has encountered a large difference in the two prices, please step up and force the union to bring this to a grievance.

 

The real question is how can the union roll over on the accepted practice, when backed up by the FCIF, where you can catch up with a scheduled pairing.

 

Accepted Fares BS

I think this is a face saving issue for contract adminstation here. The FCIF that established the company paid for internet is the same one that established the initial deviation bank as the "The ONLY Deviation Bank." I think contract admin or one of our union representatives missed this fast one when they were initially presented with the opportunity to get free internet(pure speculation on my part but very plausible). Hell, I missed it too.
I recently lost $600 on this one and got no traction from contract admin when I pointed out how this new accepted fares policy conflicted with past practice. $600 is a hell of a lot of internet! The only way I can fathom that "OUR UNION" is not defending past practice for deviation banks is that someone does not want to admit that he got hoodwinked and contract admin is covering for them.

 

Jaxman187, if the lost $600 was in the past few months, I encourage you to take it back to contract admin and try to grieve this. Again, we should not be allowing our union to just roll over on this one.