I'm sorry, did you actually say "parental sponsored travel and leisure?!"

 

Again…I’m guessing you don’t have college age kids and are therefore speaking about something you only have second-hand knowledge of at best.

 

How do you know?

 

I didn't say that all rotations need to be hyper commutable and also made of whatever gossamer that pilots who pretend they go to bed at 6-7PM and get 8 hours of solid REM every time say they enjoy. Insert your own hypothetical here, like one early leg to AUA, 24+ on the beach and one leg home. I'm not arguing for zero trips like that; they are fine...to a point.

But our current trips with fewer and fewer exceptions (thought there are some) suck for everyone. There will always be some early reports. There will always be some late releases. There will always be some trips with both. Its the prevalence of overlapping negative factors since the "optimizer" was given prime directive supremacy over rotation construction that is negatively impacting trips and QOL for more and more pilots more of the time. So much so that simply "living in base" (which sometimes means 2-3 hours, or more, on the road, each way...LOL!) isn't enough to get back to the pre-optimizer QOL *some* commuters (by air) used to enjoy not that long ago.

There will always be trips with negative factors; that's the nature of the operation. There will always be: early reports, late releases, redeyes, flights and overnights on holidays, legs per day, plane changes, long "sits", mad dashes across 5 concourses to a flight that's already boarding, reroutes to save the operation, long overnights, short overnights, shifting circadian windows, etc. The problem isn't any one of those things, or even some of those things some of the time. Its the sheer prevalence of more and more of them in any given rotation that force multiply eachother over time.

There's not enough PTC early risers to come close to 50%+1 on a TA that doesn't address significant rotation construction concerns. Not after the "running it a little hot" age of the Optimizer. Work rules will be a huge concern for C2019 IMO.

 

So when someone says, "I'm really fortune that my kid got a x% scholarship" I should assume they are lying?

 

For every one of those there are many that aren’t able to get them. Even with high test scores. Ask me how I know…

 

God forbid kids go to community college for two years and then transfer to an in-state public school

And yes, there most definitely are scholarship opportunities for kids, that don't have anything to do with the parents' income.

Either way, this falls squarely into 'what other people do with their money,' and is not relevant to contract negotiations. If people want to pay obscene amounts of money for college or cars or art or drugs, that's none of my business. Why does this matter?

 

Honestly, it doesn’t. Got carried away in the moment…

 

for February, ATL 73NB has like 7 blue days, 4 of which are blue by 1 person…in February.

this is all before the first PCS run of the month

 

Most states Air National Guard offers 60-100% Tuition reimbursement, plus GI BILL, kicker and signing bonuses. They don't discriminate based on what the parents make...just need to be able to run a mile 1.5 miles. If they don't go for aviation, they'll be making quite a bit of money every month to pay for rent/food. Even with aviation, it paid me enough to graduate with my degree and CFII with only a few thousand in debt.