StarClipper

BS 57% of you guys are to be blamed. At the end of the day it’s the yes vote which brought this POS into play.

HoursHore

The problem with secondary during vacation month is you don't get extension/expansion. Your foot print is your foot print, and they'll build your line around it. You also don't get leveling for reserve. Personally I look forward to taking a month off three times a year.

Adlerdriver

Correct. One must be able to hold a line to expand vacation. One must be able to hold a reserve line to expand.

You look forward to something that a junior pilot with 15 days of vacation cannot. He's got essentially one strong month's worth of vacation hours to work with. Try taking a month off three times a year with that.

So, rather than tell them how bad a secondary line and vacation is (which might be all they can hold), how about you tell them how they can make the best of their current situation?

HoursHore

We've reduced the amount of reserve lines by 20%, so they'll have less a chance of holding a reserve line during vacation. I don't bid vto on vacation months because there's always been enough reserve lines to get one from year one. But not now for junior guys. We decided to give the company the ability to place 20% of known (what's that even mean by the way)r days where they want. That is pbs.

FXLAX

Thanks for sharing that advice. Not just flex, but anyone on pay only should probably bid this way. Hopefully others will share their best practices on bidding with the new system as well. Its too bad the Union doesn’t have a cheat sheet (gouge). I know they have a couple of articles written from before the current contract but even just a bullet point version of the contract for anyone to read without being an attorney would be a good start.

ColCargill

The union is too busy trying to invent financial instruments for retirement (to benefit the over 25yr crowd) than to put out information to help the unwashed masses.

kronan

Except, with the New Secondary System---you have the Ability to adjust your Vacation Footprint...for the 1st Time ever...could be up to 12 days if you want. (15 in a 5 week month)
Could be 0 days too, if you want to Sell Back Vacation.

And, for the First Time ever, a Secondary Line Holder has the ability to request to use Vacation Hours as part of his\her BLG in a month they DON'T have a scheduled vacation period.

Approved in strict Seniority Order, dependent upon Staffing. So, thinking odds of Exercising this are pretty limited in December...much easier in September or October

HoursHore

Is it really an improvement to have to use more vacation days to achieve the same effect as extension? 7 days on an r line can knock out ten. You need to use 10 on a secondary. With more secondaries more people will have to do this.

I agree that there are improvements to secondary system. But withholding 20% of r days and increasing the number of secondaries is not one of them. I do not think it's nessesary anyway to prevent reserve conversion since a great number of r days drop during cic and involuntary conversion consists of them putting trips on your line anyway.

kronan

Let's see,
You can knock out 10 days for a Vacation bank useage of 45'sh CHs and leave you with 5 Days of Reserve somewhen in the Month.

For a VTO line, you can knock out 7 days (buffers on both sides so it's a moving 11 day block) using 42 hours of Vacation and leaving you with roughly 30 hours to be earned...or 5 days Somewhen.
If you are relatively Senior, those 5 days will be actual flying trips which tend to be easier to drop\move than R days.
If you simply have a staycation, you Also have the ability to trade up those 30 hours into 42 hours...say for example a weekend layover at Home\Ski city pops up and you so desire....or a 7 day better trip comes into play.

OR, if you want, and wish to use your Vacation bank...You can turn those 7 days of Vacation into 10 days of Vacation for a bank use of 60...leaving you with only 2 or 3 days of Work....or you could turn those 7 days of Vacation into 12 days of Vacation for 72 hours of bank and more likely than not---the whole month off

It is All Vacation Bank hours, not simply Days. And the end Result is pretty similar in terms of how much work you have to do.

The Benefit to Reserve Vacation, is that you can get More Continuous days off for your Bank use. In your Example, a 14 day Continuous period where CRS can't schedule you for 45 hours of bank use versus an 11 day Continuous period where CRS can't schedule you for 42 hours of VTO Vacation Bank use

FrankTheTank

And LEVELING.. This is a huge loss with vacation and secondaries!