Are you sure about that? I know you only get holiday pay if you work, but I’m not sure about extended duty pay and sit pay. I know you keep the extended duty pay if bought off for OE so I just assumed you’d keep it for sick leave. I thought that’s why the trigger was raised to 120 hours.

Sick is pay and credit so I’m not sure how pay/no credit items could be converted to credit by calling in sick. It’s sort of a double edged sword because if you call out sick for a trip you lose the extra pay but also save more sick time in your bank. The 120 hour verification as far as I know has nothing to do with this rather it was just trying to make using sick time less burdensome by giving more leeway before needing verification.

I’ve always found it to be a mystery why anyone here is concerned with saving sick time in their bank. Particularly those who white slip after calling in well to replenish their sick time.

It’s “use it or lose it” every year. The vast majority of Delta pilots leave sick time unused at the end of the year. I’d much prefer that all of the soft pay items draw from my sick time so that I have a greater chance of receiving the full balance.

Thanks for reiterating. I retire in May of ‘27, maybe I’ll see it in my final check.

Yes, there are a ton of open ACE reports, yes there are times when we are shorted soft pay that we are due, but to say we should give up on soft pay because of that is short-sighted IMO.

Almost every trip I fly has some kind of soft pay in it. Most of the time it is paid correctly. I work less and get paid the same. Yes, soft pay is paid incorrectly much too often, but I would still always prefer it to just straight pay all the time.

PM sent, thanks.

Agreed. I’m up over a days worth of pay next month without doing anything more than I would have anyways.

Pay rates. Simple. Clean. Pure. Do not require extra effort on the employee's part to mend if shorted. Further, in our pattern bargaining world, higher rates, lift the bar for all others to then pattern off of. Soft pay? Meh, they have to figure that out and it becomes very very shop specific. DALPA was scared, they didn't bother to push rates where they needed to be adjusted for inflation (I made more as a MD-88 capt decades ago than a 717A does now thanks to inflation and our crappy pay rates). Soft pay does not fill the gap, it doesn't pay all the time, like a rate. We were in a period of having leverage like never before and as always, DALPA snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, capitulated to management (who laughs at us to date at what a good deal this contract is for THEM) and then high fives themselves for deliviering yet another substandard contract to the group. We didn't give our friends much to benchmark off of either. I've come to expect this from our organization. They never fail to disappoint me. BTW I did vote yes for C19. I flipped around a bit, but eventually I voted yes. I was not happy they left out totally one of the pillars.

You'll have to live with this soft pay hate boogie, not me. This is my last contract at DAL. I don't fly NB either. The saddest part is that we could have done much better, as there was never more of a favorable environment for pilots than now. Enjoy your homework figuring out what and how you should have been paid for work you gave them (that's why they are laughing a us - they are saving millions).

pay rates alone don’t shape pairing construction in ways that improve our lives at work. Soft time rules do. This doesn’t affect you, but that doesn’t make soft time “suck.” Commuter policies don’t affect me but I’m still glad we have them.


the fact that you think all of our soft pay requires “homework” betrays a thorough ignorance of the topic.

Translation: the only way I benefit is in pure pay rate, and I didn’t get enough, and I don’t like the NB pilots closing the gap with soft pay. (which, BTW, paid me an extra six hours on my last rotation in Sit/carve/EDP/reroute, not ADG, none of which I would have gotten in the last contract)

Also, as a point of fact, retirement was not “left out totally“. Why do people think that if they exaggerate, it makes it more true, or helps make some point? We are three months away from getting 17%, and 27 months away from getting 18%. What we did not get, was the “minimum balance”. If you want to be frustrated about that, that is certainly your right, and I can even understand that to an extent. But please don’t misrepresent our gains.