What's a Lance Captain?

 

Good point. The Lance program is limited to only 3.2% of the FOs so roughly 130 pilots total, but it helps grease the gears of the trip trading, swapping, ELITTing system at the airline. It's been argued that if it went away every pilot would see a reduction in schedule flexibility, so it's really nice to see that the program was kept.

 

Essentially you are a senior FO that retains your seniority, vacation bidding, premium bidding, etc, but you get to pickup 9 days of flying as a Captain. It is an awesome deal for those that can hold it. Some of our Lances make way more than most Captains. It's actually easier and requires less seniority to hold full Captain than it requires to hold Lance Captain.

 

According to the bullet points, lances are no longer going to be limited to 9 captain duty periods. It was a stupid restriction anyway.
The one year up or out thing is yet another restriction on the program. I am not sure that I am super excited about that. Yes, I would love to lance and may explore it when I get to that level of seniority, but I don't have a problem with someone remaining a lance forever. Different people have different things going on in their lives and the lance program allows some guys to make things happen with their families that otherwise wouldn't happen. I respect that. Also, guys lancing allow other guys who want to upgrade to do so at artificially low seniority. You don't have to hit 50 percent to upgrade here and I think that is a good thing. We will see what the final language says, but I don't view that restriction as a positive.

 

Whack,
I support retro for any tranny that was here on an amendable contract. From what I understand, they had a contract over on the other side of the partition and it was not amendable. Why would they get retro?
This isn't a troll, I am not looking to pick a fight, I just seriously want to understand your reasoning.
Again, we haven't seen the final details, so it may be that they are getting retro. If so, good for them. I am not against anyone getting more money, I just don't see any reason for it.
Also, the ship has sailed on 2012. Old SWAPA effed that away with yet anther side letter. Let that be a lesson to all of us and move on.

 

Uh boy. This will get ugly quick. How about we just wait until the end of this week and this issue should be resolved.

 

This is like the 2x greenslip vs 1.5 over 80 argument at DAL.

 

Obviously I agree we cannot be blinded by 777 rates etc. But that is NOT how s/he came across. To me, it was: I don't care about the senior guys. Me and my buds are looking out for ourselves and everybody else should look out for us too! Hopefully s/he really doesn't feel this way but that's the way it came across to me in that particular post.

Denny

 

Sounds good.

 

Forbes Welcome