Yes. That's the absolute lowest bar to clear. Anything other than what they did is inhumane. Delta doesn't get kudos for allowing a FA to go see her dying father

 

Agreed. Family in hospital or dying should be a "we move heaven and earth to get you to the closest city with service ASAP" by policy, vs "S1A authorized, but if you get a nice manager you may get more" crap shoot.

My brother in law died right as I was starting indoc, and they did handle that well. But as I later learned that was a manager involved in pilot indoc (BB) who cared about people, and not policy.

Positive space for me and family to Brother in Laws funeral. Company and ALPA both sent flowers. Full pay (granted its easier with the way training pay works)

Parent dying? Off trip without pay, here's S1, good luck.

Ive seen both ends of the spectrum and the "Positive space home/to where you need to be" should be policy not if you got lucky and were dealing with a manager who cares.

 

Why is it not fair? They didn't know about said trip and got paid for it anyway. The whole purpose is a disincentive to skip coverage or at least not punish the person who should have flown the trip from being cheated. As you have shown with multiple in a day, there will be other trips. I used to clear my schedule to build a better one (known as credit surfing) I never once have received a 23M7 and managed to reconstruct an acceptable line. The risk of clearing your schedule is real and if you have to scramble at the end of the month, then that is due to your own decision. A counter is the only way to move the benefit down the seniority list fairly. If all you want is 4 day 23M7 pay then your slips should reflect that. Just like it would reflect the 1 or 2 days during the week if you are credit surfing. BWYWWWYB This isn't an ATM it's a way to keep the company from messing with the pilot group.

 

The real test is what if a 4th floor dweller or a 9to5er was on a work trip and it happened to them? Any company with an employee on a work trip that required travel would ensure the employee got home or where they needed to be immediately. That means the company would buy the ticket.

 

"They let me leave work and non-rev home when my mom died and sent us some basic flowers" is a pretty low bar 😂

 

Much of the coverage problem is CS staffing, not pilot staffing. We have min run the number and training of schedulers. Trips sit in open time for hours while pilots waste time on hold trying to reach a scheduler.

A 23M7 counter reduces the incentive to clear and fish for unlimited trips. Set a 23M7 preference just like a GS preference if you don't want the 1 day payout

 

I disagree the counter is a bad idea. If you are M7 hunting, you get what you get and it moves on. It’s the risk you run, just like people bidding LCA trips that the LCA then drops, 23K green slip bait and switch, etc. sometimes you win sometimes you lose.

 

This. The top few in my category rarely actually take a GS, so rarely that I suspect their reason for having a slip in at all is solely for the M7 payouts.

"Fair" doesn't apply when getting something is pure luck. Putting a counter on it is the least we could do. We really should make it more expensive for the company to use the option in the first place.

 

The bold part is the problem. How do we ever truly know who ACTUALLY would fly the trip? It's impossible to determine. And I disagree that the purpose of 23M7 is to disincenvize skipping trip coverage. If it was truly worked that way then why is being used left and right? The purpose of 23M7 is to provide flexibility to the company in trip coverage while ensuring that a pilot who was skipped is made whole. It's not there to spread money throughout the entire category. WS and GS go in seniority order. We don't we have a WS counter too? Because that's too much of an abrogation of seniority when it comes to schedule control. If a pilot is the most senior to have a WS in and gets skipped, he should get 23m7, because that makes him whole for being the harmed pilot. He's not harmed again until he gets skipped for another rotation that he'd be legal for had he also flown the first skipped rotation. A junior pilot is never the actual harmed pilot unless scheduling cuts coverage in the middle of a step and the trip was on that junior pilot's line at that time.

You talk about a schedule clearer bearing the risk of not being able to fill back up, but how can a pilot fill up when they are repeated getting skipped for trips that they would have done in order to fill up? It's not their fault when scheduling doesn't even run the WS step and shoots tons of trips out to IA. Yes, there are defintely M7 surfers out there right now, but if you add a counter that just incentivizes literally the entire category to put in slips hoping they score one. It's the same thing since practically none of them would have any intention of actually picking up any of the M7 rotations if they were actually offered.

So you say the point of a counter is to move the M7 payments further down the list. I say that it's original intent is to make the harmed pilot whole. A counter would never actually pay the harmed pilot. The logical method is to use the "assumed it was flown" method for determining when the next payment would be due. This by it's very nature would drive M7 further down the list, just not nearly as far as a counter would. So we as a pilot group need to decide what we want - a process that more protects seniority and more closely tracks with making a harmed pilot whole, or one that spreads the money around much more but is basically a lottery system hoping you get a good "skip" when your number is up?

 

The current problem is the whole seniority list is being harmed while those top 3 in each category are gobbling up M7 "harmed pilot" pay. Everyone in the middle is get passed on GS they should've had while they get awarded as IAs to the bottom. That's the true abrogation of seniority.

So I would argue if we really care about "harmed pilots" getting paid, we need to look at how the current system pays. Because it's more than just that senior pilot getting skipped for a WS.