Originally Posted by FIIGMO

At times we hear about negative experiences that individual pilots have had in dealing with the company during difficult times. Although not appropriate, nor a desire to share personal info in a forum such as this, I feel compelled to share with the DAL pilots who read this forum my personal experiences working with company and ALPA during a difficult family emergency.

As chance would have it my youngest experienced an unfortunate life changing event and will improve and be fine as we proceed into the future. I was overwhelmed (putting it mildly) with the support and concern I received from everyone in the company I had to deal with while my family and I worked through a very difficult time. My Chief pilot, Flt Ops Mgr, ALPA and DAL have been (and continue to be) a great resource, accommodating, supportive and very helpful. I can not thank them enough.

It is important that this perspective gets to see the light of day because we sometimes only get to hear the bad and not enough of the good!

All the best!

Fiig

Originally Posted by sailingfun

You should post your statement in the scheduling section on the ALPA forum. I suspect you would find much of what you have posted is incorrect. We do have a agreement with the company and a methodology for how many short calls will be assigned in each category. It is often posted in the scheduling section the company is abusing the system and putting pilots on shortcall just because they can. When ALPA checks however it never turns out that way. They are following the guidelines agreed upon almost exactly for total number of short calls. They are allowed to increase the number of shortcalls if a IROPS is expected however audits have shown no abuse by the company using that out. Historically the average pilot on reserve at Delta sits right around 3 short calls per month. It varies with category and time of year but the statement that they simply put guys on shortcall up to the 6 max because they can has never been shown to be even close to correct.

Originally Posted by dalad

Things are going to get interesting, look south and to the west.

Originally Posted by Elvis90

?????????????

Do you mean the strong cold front from New Mexico to Wisconsin?

Originally Posted by dalad

Things are going to get interesting, look south and to the west.

Originally Posted by dragon

Ok,

How far west? HI? Australia? Are we merging with HAL and Quantas? Is AMR about to be swallowed by LCC? Either way, I agree things are going to be interesting between now and 12/31/12 assuming we make it past 12/21/12!

Originally Posted by Jesse

What we have now is very similar to what you described. I like that we can put our preference in for what SCs we would like if we have to have SC; and that if we want SC we can ask for it. As has been mentioned, what really takes away from these improvements is that the schedulers have taken a new tactic of using almost all available pilots for SC once they've assigned open time trips out for the next day. So even when you've done 3 SCs (in bucket 2 for the SC buckets), and have done enough flying to be in the higher RAW bucket than anyone else, and are senior to everyone else you can still expect to get assigned SC because you have a pulse. Just having one day of availability remaining doesn't necessarily mean you're going to escape the long line of SC pilots. What sucks even more, IMHO, is when you've maxed your SCs, and you're in the highest bucket, just finished 4 days of flying and because you can't be assigned SC they give you a trip with 13 hrs notice while a pilot with the same availability is assigned to sit his second SC, and has done less than half the flying you have and is considered untouchable because he's a SC asset for the following day. Crazy system. The schedulers, at least in ATL M88 B, have in effect, negated the benefits of the new reserve system by maxing out SCs. And going to 7 SCs will further undermine it.

Originally Posted by sailingfun

You should post your statement in the scheduling section on the ALPA forum. I suspect you would find much of what you have posted is incorrect. We do have a agreement with the company and a methodology for how many short calls will be assigned in each category. It is often posted in the scheduling section the company is abusing the system and putting pilots on shortcall just because they can. When ALPA checks however it never turns out that way. They are following the guidelines agreed upon almost exactly for total number of short calls. They are allowed to increase the number of shortcalls if a IROPS is expected however audits have shown no abuse by the company using that out. Historically the average pilot on reserve at Delta sits right around 3 short calls per month. It varies with category and time of year but the statement that they simply put guys on shortcall up to the 6 max because they can has never been shown to be even close to correct.