Can you drop trips though? Your category has negative reserve coverage every day next month. Same with many categories across the airline. In February.

 

The problem with the doctor/lawyer/banker comparison is that it used to work in the 80s and 90s but is totally irrelevant today. Airline compensation has been pretty stagnant for the last twenty years. I loved JLs memo about it increasing 50% in the last 10 years. A convenient metric disregarding BK. Any of the trades now make more than all RJ pilots and more than most 1st/2nd/3rd year legacy pilots. It takes people 5-20 years to get to a legacy and either 10 years of debt or a couple hundred K of debt depending on MIL vs CIV. Meanwhile my 26 year-old electrician pulls in almost 200k, has his pick of jobs, works four days a week, and has an army of little apprentices that he sends to the easy jobs. Comparing compensation at a legacy to Doc/Lawyer/banker at any large firm is laughable. Yes the first 3-5 years sucks but compensation goes parabolic after that. They will make our lifetime earnings in 15 years and could punch out. If the economy tanks, guess what you're screwed and it's not like you can leave for greener pastures because your pay starts over. I think all pilots are due a huge compensation bump and are finally in a position to command it. I hope that management feels the pain of an understaffed operation and is willing to get it done.

 

Yes I can drop trips either thru straight drops or swap board drops. Every category I've been in getting rid of trips is usually not a problem because some commuter looking to set their schedule or sometimes SLIs looking to fly will usually grab a trip if unavailable to straight drop due to staffing

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Best description I hear a pilot give about his job. “Best damn part time job in the world”.
A far higher percentage of pilots have a second job verses doctors and lawyers. By the way many doctors are on call several days of the week and even have a maximum distance they can live from the hospital. I recently moved from a community full of Doctors. I asked one why so many lived there and he said it was the maximum distance they could live from the city and meet there on call obligations. That was driven home for me when my wife needed a emergency surgery at night. The anesthesiologist and surgeon both were called in at 9 PM on a Saturday night.

 

Copy…doc got tagged with a trip while on short call.

 

Shouldn't we be comparing ourselves to our peers at other legacies/FDX/UPS? Apples to apples.

​​​​​​Come on guys, focus.

 

It's not going to matter after Delta acquires Spirit.

 

Well said. Management is trying to set expectations. Another way to look at - With a 43% reduction in bankruptcy from two bites of the apples (concession and another concession), it took a 75% increase to get back to the same pay rate. Did we get back to pre bankruptcy pay rates ? Yeah, eventually, incrementally many years later and with lost purchasing power.

 

The most valuable asset we have is our time, so heading down the path where we sell control over it concerns me. There is a broad basket of items that get lumped into QOL. Arguably the biggest is control over our schedules. We can use many examples of trip drops, swaps and moving off days that work in some categories and not in others. Over time, we use our seniority to bid for our perception of the optimal mix of pay, time off and enjoyable trips. Although there are plenty of individual examples of great QOL, the standard across all 13,000 of us has eroded over the last decade. Some items that improve QOL will cost the company money, some of them will not.

The best thing we can do for QOL is return more control to the pilots, rather than finding ways to monetize loss of control. Here are a few random ideas on giving us more control.

-Increasing RR pay cedes control. Giving pilots the option to deny a RR or accept premium pay returns control.
-Our Holiday Pay is effectively GS for those willing to work, but senior enough not to. Providing holiday pay and bidding for it via PCS provides more pilot control than bidding for off days and looking for GS.
-Giving the RCC a level of control vs using auto-delete on all suggestions would be an improvement in control.
-Increased vacation pay and credit for non summer weeks. (bid for a lower paying summer week or a higher paying winter week)


Any more ideas to regain control vs codifying how we sell even more of it?

 

The company will never concede the option for pilots to simply deny a reroute. It would be a deal killer and on a practical basis would be impossible to implement. “We just got a maintenance ready time on your aircraft and it’s two days out. We are going to reroute you to XXX to fly to XXX and layover.” I am sorry I don’t accept reroutes. I will remain in Jackson MS.