Vacation
 

Our current max vacation is 126 hours.

In 1990 (28 years ago) the Delta pilots max vacation was 191:15. 7 weeks.

FedEx pilot max is 216 hours. 6 hours per day.


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Jerry Fielding

If we are going to get back to 191 hours during a contract that will see an explosion in retirements, there will simply have to be some offsetting productivity swap (IMHO). Personally, I can accept adding an additional week at all longevity steps, while making that one and only one week eligible for voluntary sell-back.

I too think productivity gives will be fought hard by the company, but vacation sellback is not something I want in the contract. 1 week this contract, every week the next. There are more creative ways to get more money out of our vacation. The problem with vacation sellback is that pilots will sell it back...

Also, don't discount UPS style vacation just because they "only" have 175 hours worth of vacation. If they drop two weeks of vacation in one month, they have a provision to get the entire month off. I know, I know, they're "not our peers..." :rolleyes:

Vacation is one area that we are truly lagging the industry. :( As far as productivity goes if we are retiring a lot of Pilots we should hire accordingly.


There are many ways to measure productivity with the most common being block hours flown. Block hours however do not relate to profits but revenue does. Last time I checked, on a per Pilot basis, DAL Pilots produce more revenue per year than Southwest Pilots. Our productivity is fine.


Scoop

2017 operating revenue per pilot.
DL-1357xxx
SWA-1337xxx

Total revenue however is more in our favor. Delta had 41B in total revenue with 14,600 pilots. SWA had 21B with 9600 pilots.

When a senior (19+ year) pilot retires, that removes 5 weeks of 'pilot productivity loss' at the top of whatever pay-scale said pilot resides.

When we hire a new pilot, we're adding 1-2 weeks of 'pilot productivity loss' at the lower end of the pay scales.

Does the massive number of retirements and the resulting shift (younger/newer) of the pilot group influence our leverage/negotiating capital in this area? I know that in terms of the whole, this may be a drop in the bucket.
But to me it seems like the retirements are reducing a cost of a 'senior' pilot group.

No offense intended to the senior pilots; I'm just jealous I won't ever hit the 19+ level on the vacation scale. (hired older)

Adjust that to account for the massive fleet variety that the company electively chooses to have. At a minimum over 1000 pilots can be taken out of that end of the equation and placed squarely in the column of management discretion. SWA has as close to zero training churn as any airline in history, while DL has very high, almost completely self inflicted training churn. That's on them not us.

I'm adamantly against vacation sell back, and don't think we need additional weeks. We need to fix the weeks we have by way of daily hour credit increases. 3-something a day is asinine, and the last thing we need are more weeks at that anemic level.

I see an incremental increase on the scale of $.05 of per diem, but only for the first 2 weeks, and at a cost.

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As the average longevity continues to drop since 2013, so too does average sick allocation, vacation allocation, and pay scale increment. Those variables don't really change leverage, but they do soften the cost increases of improvements to vacation and pay rates.