Is that how the guys on the ski slopes and hours long flights away from base got their jobs back? I gotta try this move.

I never said 2 hours was a hard and fast limit that is set in stone.

It has however been established over tIme and through the grievance process that you need to be within 2 hours via surface transportation under normal conditions. You don’t have to get there in two hours if traffic, parking or other issues come up. This came up years ago with pilots sitting short call in San Diego and Vegas for LAX. The Vegas guys claimed they could fly in with flights every 30 minutes. The SD guys said they could drive it with no traffic in two. Neither worked out.

Your information is incorrect. Suggest you contact the Scheduling Committee to confirm.

If that was any kind of limit, you can bet it’d be plastered all over the FOM and other company documents. The fact is it isn’t, and it’s not.

Then why bring the number up at all? “Promptly available” is the only term that matters.

No one likes to use the 2 hour time limit but it is in fact a nice number they use unofficially as a basis for promptly available. It’s not 10 minutes and it’s not 10 hours to get there. If you take take 4 hours to get there from what is normally a 2 hour drive they’ll say nothing. If you take 6 hours to drive what is a 4 hour drive they are not going to be happy. But people should feel free to do whatever stupid thing they feel like they want to push. We all pick our battles. Wouldn’t be my career choice to be much more than 2 hours away in no traffic.


ALPA doesn’t like anyone to say 2 hours. It’s like “the number that shall not be spoken”. But everyone should know generally what is
acceptable.

When the company decides your definition of promptly available is not acceptable to them the system board will end up deciding. They will use past practice and rulings. The reason we don’t define it to the minute is to prevent the company from having someone they might like to see gone showing up 2:01 after getting a short call out and firing them. The reality of the whole thing is the company has been extremely lenient on short call and it only becomes a issue if a flight is significantly delayed. Crew scheds calls pilot A and if he says he can’t get there they move on to pilot B. Pilot B picks up the slack because pilot A could not be bothered to be in position for shortcall. More than likely the scheduler does not even note that pilot A was unavailable. There is plenty of past practice and history to define shortcall as approximately 2 hours and that it has to be surface transportation. If your definition of promptly available is 3 or 4 hours and it causes a operational issue I can tell you from what happened to a friend you will not like the result.

There's some inaccurate info here. You are only subject to "immediately available" if the trip cancels AFTER you report. This has happened to me on a one day maintenance ferry I picked up on a WS. I signed in, THEN maintenance decided the plane wouldn't be ready until the next day (my thoughts were "gee thanks for waiting until now to decide that, now I get to hang out here at the airport for six hours instead of at home").

Again, this only applies if the trip cancels AFTER you report. This doesn't usually happen with "normal" trips, but of course it can. And yes if you are subject to immediately available obligations, then you need to be a "Widgeteer" in uniform, at the airport.... because the contract says so. But then again you probably already are, since you have already signed in. Now you just get to hang out for a few hours for possible reassignment.

This is not the same as "promptly available" which come with the equivalence of short call obligations. If you live local you can sit SC at the house. But in this case (the whole point of this entire thread due to all the Covid cancelations) you would know about the trip removal and 23K obligations in advance.

If I have a recovery obligation tomorrow starting at 1500, for a 4 day trip, if I put in a GS, can I get one and get paid for it? Or do I have to finish my 6 hours of availability first, and then try to get one?

You can put the GS in, but I believe you aren't eligible until you are released from the 23k obligation.