yes, that would be how to do it but the reality of this situation is theyre unstacking res no matter the seniority on reserve which disrupts the x days off in mass at the beginning of the month.

the third res pilot/second res pilot with a full res schedule is unstacked.

 

Yes and no (as far as using that for leverage). They will say they were forced into "me too-ing" other groups because of us, and therefore anything extra we get will have to be bargained for at the price of the entire company.

In any case, I really hope we don't even think about the 6th week until and unless we first fix weeks 1-5 by substantially increasing their values per day. 5 hours a day should be the minimum we go for.

 

Probably so. But regardless of where his X-days sit, particularly if he bids them in as long a block as possible, he will be available for a GS trip on those days, and that will hopefully start the thunder rolling for him.

 

We will get lots as long as we're willing to overpay for the construction like any big city airport project. That skinny bridge in LGA was 350 million…the arm in JFK 1.5 BILLION, for I think under a dozen gates. Palms have to be greased in situations like this. These are the most unremarkable structures imaginable, yet if its on a big city airport a 5-10 gate terminal extension will usually cost many times more than a 1500 ft tall sky scraper. Think about it.

Now is the perfect time to pay the airport mobs their bribe money, and I expect we will do exactly that.

 

I'm not saying that I wouldn't like to have that amount of value per vacation day, but to the extent that a 7-day vacation would then be worth 1/2 of an average month, how is that different from simply adding a proportional number of vacation days in a year?

Either way, you're getting more total vacation hours, and an equally greater amount of time off vis a vis less flying assigned throughout the year due to vacation.

The downside of more vacation value per rather than more vacation days is that reserve pilots' on call days are prorated by the number of vacation days they hold, and not by the value of those vacation days. IOW, while a regular line holder would get more days off in a vacation month either way, a reserve pilot would only get more if he had more vacation days.

 

It could easily be both.

We could be short of planes and even shorter on pilots. Marketing plugs in how much they want the planes that we have to fly, and Flt Ops says if we can do it or not. But that doesn't mean we couldn't use more planes (assuming we had the staffing for them, which we don't, which is why its a moo point at this time).

 

You shouda seen the beak wetting on building the LGA terminal off of 31.

 

The conventional wisdom is they were buffing the books for a better quarter/full year. However I can't see how 150 new hire pilots on staff making training pay would make a dent anyway. My back of the napkin math, with an additive for gusty conditions, says 3 months of 150 pilots making training pay is around 2 million bucks. Plug that into our numbers from last year and you can't even tell a difference. The stock would be exactly where it is now, the debt would be paid off exactly on schedule with exactly the same interest rate and we'd still be paying dividends and buying back shares at peak prices ()

Except now we have to leave revenue and marketshare on the table that we could otherwise do profitably, and as an added bonus, we provide even more opportunity for the endless growth mode airlines to swoop in and take it at an incredible profit for themselves.

We've done a lot of things right lately, but holding off on hiring just for a trinket of paper statistics at the expense of the operation was a bad call.

 

Only if you are in the strata to get that 6th week, which the vast majority of the pilots are not. We don't need more vacation for some, we need better vacation for all. Increasing the daily value of the vacation we have first is the only way to do that. We shouldn't have far worse vacation than the two largest LCC's.

 

Who are the 'endless growth mode' airlines you allude to?