No.

The recent FAR 117 deal was already too close to Section 6 negotiations.
Why give away leverage in small chunks? That's foolish.

There should be no more LOAs that solve management's problems until Contract 2015 is done.

Our contract spells out the process for dealing with surpluses. They need to follow it.

80, that's great! His daughter did a wonderful job and it would seems she is as proud of him as he is of her ...

... and isn't that what having kids is all about? :)

Passenger seat miles
 

Talk of scope on here lately has got me wondering, is there any way to determine what percentage of Passenger Seat Miles currently being marketed and sold by Delta Air Lines are flown by Delta Pilots?

In other words, how relavant are we right now as a pilot group to the product being sold as Delta...

First I have never said it was not a concession. I have said that it was offset by other changes. I have been around a long time. The company has other options to deal with both summer flying and very long trips. The flying at this airline has changed dramatically over the years I have worked here. The contract has to adapt to those changes for both sides. The company has to be able to put bodies into seats and pilots need a reasonable quality of life.
The company a while back put out a summery of the shift in summer verses winter flying and how much it has changed over time. At one time we had a fixed cap. The solution was to displace every fall and post a AE every spring. Since guys were forced back and forth on equipment they were relatively current on it did not generate much training and worked for the company. I went back and forth from the 727 to 767 several times winter to summer. The other solution which DALPA managed to eliminate before I was hired was dual qualed pilots.
As far as ALV plus 15 the company had a issue covering longer trips. Pre merger the average trip was much shorter overall. We also had fewer commuters. With basing changes and a dramatically improved reserve system we now have a lot more commuters. New hires choose to commute now which is something you never saw years ago. NW was a largely commuter airline and their trip structure evolved into longer trips as a result. Today we have a airline with a significant number of pilots who want longer trips. We could have said no way to ALV15. We would probably then have not seen the improvements we were able to extract for that. The company would have reacted by reducing trip length. 5 day trips would have gone away and 4 day trips would have been reduced. Longer international flying would have been restructured.
Every change in the contract has causes and effects some of which are anticipated and some of which are not forecast. As the airline evolves the contract has to evolve also for both sides. As far as ALV15 I think the union managed to strike a great balance with the company. We had issues and they had issue. We managed to raise reserve pay 8%, eliminate guys being worked every on day in vacation,training and mil leave months and reduce the value where a pilot is full for the month when full.
In retrospect it looks like we got the much better end of the deal as the company has not been able to use ALV15 nearly as much as they hoped with 117 coming on line. In fact it's almost a non issue.
Back to the original post about working more I have been through multiple cycles of being worked to much to bidding reserve to take the month off. 98% of that is caused by manning. If you're over manned life is good unless you want to fly more time. If undermanned life sucks unless you want overtime. The current situation has little to do with the contract and everything to do with manning.

Me too, but he (ATL 737 B) was on a scheduled deadhead and was in uniform. The agent asked had he been flying it, he said it was a deadhead, guy went ballistic on him.

He went to the CPO and now we get a memo about a $1000 fine for showing your id.

How does one sign up for something like that?

Agreed. My understanding is the early retirement scheme targets (from memory) 25 whale captains, but to get that number it has to be offered to everyone in seniority order. When they get the desired number of 747 guys, the early retirement/ bridge program ends.

According to Tom Goodman and Maddog Max, the water's fine...

The original system did have a mechanism for seniority on trip assignments.

On the 1st day of the month all of the pilots were lined up in seniority order. If the RES coverage was full then that senior pilot wouldn't flying for a while.

EXCEPT, SC. SC was assigned at random and at the whim of that particular schedule. Sometimes everyone was on reserve and sometimes nobody. It was unpredictable and had senior pilots asking for SC when it was unnecessary but if you wanted to chose your time it was all you could do. But if you were senior and got a trip on SC, you were now at the very way way back of the order. Even if it was a day trip, you were now at the way back. You weren't going to fly.

SC needed to be fixed. What they went after, on behalf of those who wanted seniority to be the only factor (i.e. month off with pay) was revamping the trip assignments. At the time you could have 100 guys on reserve, 40 on reserve on weekends who were going to fly (they allowed weekend coverage to drop very low back then) and then 60 guys on weekday res. Those 60 pretty much had the same QOL and it wasn't bad. The bucket system transferred the QOL to the top 10 of those and required the others to fly in their place.

The mistake in doing all of this was you showed the company that 10 out of 100 RES guys could go all month with 0 RAW and 0 SC. Well guess what, we only need 90 RES then... so they cut RES to 60. Now everyone is going to fly and the company could now take RES pilots from flying 20-30 hours closer to the 60 average they feel like they're paying for. I guess that left the beneficiary to be international RES pilots on slow months, the NB guys lost more than they gained.

http://www.secrant.com/Images/Icons/Iconcheers.gif

Based on Sept. Category List, that would take it to seniority#156, assuming ALL top 25 744A's took the deal.

OK then... have you flown 99 hours as a reserve? Who here has? I don't know ANYBODY that has done that, and I'll betcha there aren't any pilots that have done it for multiple months. This is much ado about nothing.