notEnuf

Understood, but until that makes it's way into the PWA bid and PCS accordingly.

Iceberg

Is that what I said? Again, if coverage prevents a SINGLE (as in one, not all) reserve from being able to hold a particular day off, that is an issue.

Tommy Boy

I've heard the same

Big E 757

I think you know that’s not what he’s talking about. We are talking about a weekend day in September. Not Christmas.

LumberJack

Coverage for reserves is a huge hole in the contract. There's no reason I should need to PCS an X day onto a coverage day. The fact you can turn right around and do that is proof that it's unnecessary and purely there for their convenience.

The worst is when you can't do that because of the more strict X day move requirements with PCS. Those are the times they're forcing you to work when they don't actually need you. No amount of bidding prowess will save you from this scenario if you can't hold a line. And if you can hold a line but prefer reserve, it's an unnecessary QOL hit.

hockeypilot44

Contractually, the line holders are protected from coverage awards. Top 50 percent of lineholders (doesn't include reserves in category) in holiday months and I believe 65 percent (need to check contract for reference) in non-holiday months. Reserves are not protected. I'm okay with it. Reserves are usually needed on holidays and weekends. You're complaining about pilots not being able to sit all their reserve days on the days they are most likely to not fly.

Herkflyr

No we aren't complaining about "pilots" in general. We get it. We are complaining about super senior pilots, up to and possibly including the #1 pilot in the category, not being able to hold a particular day off via a reserve line. Pre-PBS, when reserve lines were pre-built (and to be fair, the rules for reserve sucked FAR worse than today, as I've documented numerous times on this forum) I am pretty sure that the most senior guy bidding a reserve line was able to find one that had an X day where he preferred it.

But the other comments are valid as well.

1. Right or wrong, the contractual language is what it is. The key to prospering in this career is understanding the contract and working within the language accordingly, while always striving to improve it.
2. The company rarely changes things in our favor "just to be nice." Sometimes they do (short call window reduced to nine hours, new hires finally getting hotels for all of initial training) but never count on it.
3. Understanding these two points, guys bidding reserve, which includes me occasionally (including this month in fact) always "hope for the best and plan for the worst" with the "Prefer Off XX, Else Start Next Bid Group" as your default position.

I'm out.

sailingfun

Some will never accept that when all is said and done the company needs bodies in the seats to operate the airline.

Iceberg

You’re being overly dramatic and dismissive. Obviously, they need pilots to operate the airline. The point was, coverage shouldn’t be all the way up the list. If there are any non-holiday days that not a single reserve can have off, they need to fix the staffing or lower the setting for coverage.

crewdawg

​​​​​​70th percentile for Holiday months. Of course they're needed during holidays, but in this respect, I think we should explore reserves having the same protections (50/70 percentile) as lineholders. To me, that means more properly staffing the category and a greater percent of a category on reserve. I'm only the occasional reserve bidder, and only doing so now because our trips are so terrible.


Lol, when they company consistently starts every month with negative coverage on 75%+ of the days, and we have guys getting their 4th/5th/6th GS month after month, I'd say that it's the company that doesn't accept that fact.