Me too

10char

Beats your suggestion of auctioning flying to the lowest bidder.

different posters iirc

The majority of pilots flying these IAs are not junior. They might be junior to you, but not "junior".

First IA of the day today went to a 3500....

Depends on the cateogry I guess, eight of the last ten IA went junior to 13,000 and only one of the other two made it to a 9,000 seniority number. So 80% have gone to the bottom 10-12% of the category...that's pretty junior. The other 20% didn't break 60% in category..

I lost 3 earlier this month. One went to an 11,000 number. That’s 95 percent in my category. The other 2 went to pilots over 4000 numbers junior to me. I’d call that junior. I only go for ones that start with deadheads to my home airport. I’m still ****ed.
My timecard is 21 plus hours short of where it should be. All it would have taken was a single flight and a commute back in the same day. I had 3 chances and lost out on ALL of them while waiting on ****ing hold. I don’t know about you, but I could always use that extra $8k.

And I'm "losing" IA opportunities to pilots WAY senior to me. Let's not lose sight of the fact we both are suffering from the same problem: stuff going out as IA NOT in seniority order.

That being said, I partly disagree with the premise that you're short X amount of hours of what they "should" be. Nobody should rely on premium flying for their baseline. Nothing is stopping you from WS or picking up from the swap board. Premium flying may be prevalent, but none of us are "guaranteed" any of it.

Why do I sometimes feel like my category is in an alternate universe from most of the company?

The better question is why is NYC7ERA manned so well vs rest of company. Barely used on RES (under 300 hours for year, with two months lineholder accounting for 160 of that)

One black day all next month. Very little in OT.

Heck, half my trips start in EWR next month (live in NJ so way easier than JFK)

This month? Nothing flown at straight pay.
1 2 day GS
1 2 day (well, 2 for PB, 1+ carve for pay) IA
​​1 2 day YS with 10:30 Holiday pay

The better question us why aren't most categories manned like us?

3500 is junior in a lot of categories. For the first two weeks of the month, every IA in my category was awarded junior to the median seniority pilot..

Now that it’s later in the month and the junior pilots have had their fill, there have been a handful awarded just barely above the median.

Its almost like inverse means something.