Hahaha, welcome to 5-6 day trips instead. And if you're only good for X number of days on reserve, make sure you pack your bag for X+1 in preparation for the junior man.

 

Oh yeah always pack an extra dsy or else you bring on the bad karma, but I haven't had a 5 day on reserve for a year and a half maybe two years.

 

The short answer is that we are poorly managed.

The long answer is that there has been a failure of management at multiple levels. Upper management scared off 500+ pilots during and after bankruptcy. We went from 3,200 pilots to around 1,800 today. They cut up and divided our flying so poorly that our schedules became very unproductive. Middle management has put in place schedule "metrics" that must be met for them to approve the bid packet. These metrics have absolutely no bearing on reality, so instead of creating more hard lines and having the normal (10-15%) of the airline on reserve, management would rather have a huge percentage on reserve, and then "keep them from sitting at home being paid" with all the open time they withheld from the monthly line building. Add onto that the closure of multiple bases down to two, when we still have an enormous amount of flying passing through major cities (like the equivalent of 40+ lines of flying in MIA with NO reserves on duty there) and they burn through the reserve list like crazy. The DCE list is almost always zeroed out, and I've seen multiple days recently where they have zero reserves for the next day and 5-6 trips still open after everyone has confirmed for the evening. I've spent the last 3-4 weeks doing 5-6 day trips covering flying in ORD, and I'm DFW based.

In other words, our management doesn't care about QOL, and that's why. At one point in NYC when I was up there, HALF of the 145 CA's in the base were on reserve. If they could put 100% of us on reserve, I'm sure they would.

 

I've had two in three weeks, and I'm in the upper half of the list.

 

CA vs FO id guess

 

No where to hide anymore. Not like the old days where the upper third at least did nothing all month.

 

How, we either give it to them, or we take paycuts equivalent to what they deem they would save with PBS. That's in writing.

 

correct, then go out and hire new pilots with 28 million dollar pay cut for the pilots on property, lets see how that works.

 

Exactly. Throw a bunch of money out to get new hires in the door, then beat them like Michael Vick with a pit bull once they're here (worse than they do already, at least). Good luck filling classes once that word spreads! Just because the contract says mgmt CAN take $28 million from us for saying no doesn't mean that it would be in their best interest given the hiring market now and in the future. Pilots have leverage over mgmt like never before thanks to the retirements and the stark lack of new blood coming into the industry. You can't be afraid to walk away from the table when terms are not agreeable to you. Call their bluff.

 

While I'm no expert on PBS, I have friends at JB and Hawaiian that seem to think PBS is fine. So whatever it takes to make it good there must be put in place here, or it's a no go from me.