I've been seeing batch size 999 a lot.

technically still in the hundreds :rolleyes:

To those who have not been through a contract here at DA, and especially those that live in ATL get ready. All aspects of the negotiations that favor the company and make YOU look bad will be broadcast on local media. 23M7 will be the talk of the town. Your non airline friends and neighbors (doesn’t apply to you PTC) will confront you with this.
The ATL media is in DA’s pocket and is NO friend to the pilot group.

I used to live in base. Thankfully now I’m far removed from Da ATL and with a year to go (as of today BTW) I really don’t have much concern as to how this contract goes for my sake. I do for my FO’s though.

Yeah, I get that better staffing reduces open time. 23.M.7 farming via OOBWS hurts fellow pilots. Yes, grinding down the coverage ladder to a 12 minute crawl hurts the company, but as pointed out by others here multiple times with multiple examples, it also hurts fellow pilots

I think the quote was something to the effect that 23.M.7 farming is only beneficial to pilots. "False." -D. Schrute.

A5S

more staffing should mean less open time. But more staffing also means reserve levels are better. Pilots will take advantage of that and drop trips until the reserve level doesn’t allow it. Then we are right back where we started.

I think what you meant to say was that auto accept harms pilots, that gets refuted easily. You are wrong and the company (the root cause discussed ad nauseum) hurts pilot by their staffing and coverage games. The obvious reaction to this is the use of auto accept has grown. Which, is a perfectly legitimate technique for dealing with nuisance calls and negotiated and then memorialized in the PWA.

If there isn't [mostly] guaranteed widespread easy money to be made, most won't drop all their schedule. While there are plenty of us who do drop everything we can, during normal times, most are too scared of "coming up short."

More staffing doesn't mean reserve levels will be better. It's called pre-posted rest. Are you living under a rock?

I was able to PD over half of my May trips and swap out of the rest and we still have blue days for just over half of May. More staffing will help.

You say that, but in my category we have months that are mostly blue. Sure there may be more dropping, but it doesn't mean that there will be so many droppers that inevitably every day will go black. There actually is a point where blue days stay blue days. I've even seen days stay blue the actual day of (as in its the 15th and the 15th is still blue).

And as pointed out, if things are more stable then WSing easy trips to the GS trigger will be much harder, leading to less drops.

These wild, chaotic times and the behavior associated won't persist in every environment. Pilot staffing will lead to more scheduling flexibility (even despite preposted rest).