Thanks.

filler

Everyone seems to be thinking of virtual bases in terms of the routes and planes currently in use. It seems to me that virtual bases are another tool the company can use to re-imagine new routes and ways of changing old routes without the cumbersome contract making opening and closing bases so costly.

The c series, with the ability to fly long thin routes could be another tool to re-imagine the way the base structure works.

Right now, lots of flights out of Dfw are on RJ's on longer routes. C series vb to upguage seems to make sense.

They could do all of that without VB's by adding a single DH leg from somewhere else, usually for 1-2 hours of credit max. The viability of routes will have nothing to do with an hour of credit inside of a 4 day trip. None whatsoever.

This is about reducing pilot jobs, period.

while a real potential byproduct.....im thinking it is not the primary objective of management.

in a word? Demming. continuous product improvement. improved efficiency is part....but so is improving the production process we are engaged in....and in the product delivered to the consumer....our customers.

they are driving this company to be the Japanese car maker equivalent in the airline industry. oh....except for the air bag thingy..:D

But why would they have deadheads on every trip when they can add a vb for free?

It's about efficiency, and increased efficiency means less pilots required, which means a company makes more money, which is the reason they exist.

I'm just thinking that they probably have a way to use vbasing to be more efficient that we have not yet effectively identified, otherwise they wouldn't have put it in the contract at all. This thought that vbasing will be useless to the company does not pass the sniff test. Does that mean we should pull it down? How about we see how we feel in a year?

It's not useless it just has a very limited application much like domestic augmented ops.

LOL exactly. Less credit, less pilot jobs. That's all this is about.

I'd say with the new admin, we may have significantly increased the chances of killing VB/TDY right off the bat.

Of course its about efficiency. But we're already highly efficient. I'm reasonable. I know hard lines, bow waves and 6 weeks of touch drops ain't coming back, etc. Not only that, but they freely choose to decimate efficiency further with their addiction to any and every fleet type on earth. Fine, not our problem. But don't tell us at today's levels of productivity that we need to give them more in that regard.

As for the VB's, I don't think we can evaluate it in a year because even then we can't and won't know the full effects and all their unintended (to us) consequences. We have to look at this in the worst possible case scenario, regardless of how they choose to handle the closely watched evaluation period.

The only purpose of this is to reduce pilot jobs. Period. That is the ONLY reason this exists.