Most major hires up until the later 80's were mil. Active duty commitments were shorter, so it wasn't just guard folks. FE was just another bid position at Delta, where folks at the bottom went, like 88B. 727C was the usual stop. As mentioned, age was also a thing until it started to go away in the mid 80s. As Badflaps said, 28-30 was the usual cutoff. Delta also had a mandatory 20/20 uncorrected for a lot of years, and other carriers had some quirky rules. AMR had a 2 day astronaut physical.

There were a smattering of civ, but they needed massive time (like 10x the mil time) to be competitive. Hard to do with a 28 year age limit, so there weren't many. Some came over as a part of mergers like Western, Republic and Ozark that had different hiring profiles. Republic was made up of a bunch of small carriers.

 

Thanks, I've tried looking for info but most of the usually books that talk about deregulation, and airline history in general seem to rarely touch on Delta. Its always "oh yeah this little airline in the southeast just kinda grew slowly and did their thing and everything was fine".

 

"Glory Lost and Found." The protagonist is Delta, and the focus is post-9/11 to 2014 ... but it looks at the entire industry and provides context with what other airlines were doing at the time. The authors did a great job of quoting/interviewing C-suite types and DALPA leaders.

A5S

 

I think having the trigger for Reg is a good thing. Watching the super senior already drop thier entire schedule, and pickup 13 days of SS is already frustrating enough. You should have to have some 'skin in the game' to be able to get the premium pay, IMO.

I wouldn't object to reducing the trigger from ALV-5 to ALV-10 or ALV-15 though.

 

I don't really care if someone wants to do the drop and fill gamble. If there is RES coverage or another pilot picks it up I don't see the issue. Silver slips are here to stay so just dealing with them is all we can do. I'd like to see them gone. With no trigger everyone would accept and acknowledge and the coverage can run as intended. If they would just code reserve GSs all as F# I would see on the time card what it's worth applied to my situation and not take 12 minutes doing higher math when woken at 0200. That would probably end a lot of the jumping to IA and oops forgetting to 23M7 the right person.

 

No trigger would benefit REG pilots in almost every way, and be worse for RES pilots. Senior REG, and commuters, would have more premium opportunity without sacrificing as much time off (as RES pilots currently enjoy). Junior REG would see more Gucci trips in open time and on the swap board. RES pilots would have to deal with more open time, higher utilization, and less premium as the GS acceptance rate increases among REG pilots.

Either way, the trigger exists primarily because it benefits the company.

 

We should join the rest of the industry and avoid a trigger. It’s an outdated relic, and wouldn’t hurt to get rid of it (mainly due to our leveling mechanism).

 

I tend to lean towards getting rid of the trigger. It is hard to judge how that would play out. You can't just extrapolate what people do today because the rule change would changes the nature of the game. First, there are a finite number of people every month who can drop their entire schedule straight up. A few more can do it by playing the swap game but again it's not like it'd be half or even 1/4 of any category. It would benefit the most senior who could clear their schedule and maybe grab 2 GS, but I could very well see a lot of that being offset by guys who don't pick up as much since they don't have to work to the trigger any more. Say someone grabs a 3 and 1 day GS. That's 42 hours of pay. Under current rules they'd still have to at least 12, and probably more like 13 days to reap the benefits of double pay. If you axe the trigger maybe some of those guys only pick up 5-6 more days to get to the 65-75 hour of pay range and they're happy with that. That would result in more broken trips that they are no longer picking up going to other pilots as nice WS or GS trips, of they go to reserves which means a nice juice 4 day goes green since there isn't a legal reserve left.

That's all just a really long-winded way of saying that we can't really predict whether eliminating the trigger will be truly good or bad overall. Certainly on a pilot-by-pilot bases there will be some big winners and losers. Maybe the NC has done some leg work on the pros and cons of no GS trigger. This of course all assumes the company would even entertain the idea at all, or entertain it at a cost the pilot group isn't willing to pay.

Edit: and if the GS trigger goes away then either SS needs to go away or there needs to be a counter like GS.

 

Please God and Baby Jesus don't push for time-and-a-half above X hours like a bunch of short-sighted clowns at a former red-tailed airline used to do...along with ranting about SOPA/SMAC

 

Absolutely not, any premium pay 200% across the board for REG and above guarantee with PBs for RES. Silver slips are not a huge impact even if one person takes 4 and does nothing else. The company designates them and there is not any difference if the top guy gets 4 or the 4 top guys get 1. Most of the group is 5 and below. With SSs going senior that means GSs go more junior. There isn't enough SS to really move the needle and if there were that's a good thing.