How do these work at Purple? Vacancy bid? Swap? A new hire going to LAX seems extremely rare from what’s posted here, but is there hope of lateraling over once on property?

Thanks for any insights.

 

Unfortunately, you have to wait for the next system bid.

 

Thank you.

 

There is hope, but we do bids once every two years and then it takes another two years to move into the base you get. Meanwhile newhires will get sent to that base before you do.

 

So starting and just missing a bid could mean four years of commuting to ANC…That’s good to know. Thank you.

 

I’m not sure if you’re here yet or waiting on a class date, but if you’re not here, I’d consider going somewhere else. Life will suck here for a long while if you’re junior. This system bid here is a real quality of life ruiner and it saves the company money.

 

^ What they said. As a new hire you better seriously hope you get what you want (or something tolerable) out of the gate because you’re gonna be parked there for a while.

Our bidding and award process here is just awful. The only way I could see it being worse is if the company just randomly assigned you a new position every two years.

I was dumbfounded when I came on board and found out how screwed up it is. Is there anywhere else that does things this way?

 

Agree with all above. The aircraft bidding system here is absolutely terrible and is entirely about the Company not wanting to train folks. Our weak contract language allows it. It’s only one example of the Company completely exploiting the contract language against us.

I too would say that if you have offers elsewhere it might be a better choice than coming here. This place isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Dare I say I regret not being at a Legacy instead?

Hiring is about to grind to a stop and a majority of the MEM 777 and 767 training slots for next year are already filled. I’d expect what few new hires we do have to be directed to the 757 and Bus to backfill those who are finally getting their chance to swap positions after a two+ year delay.

 

Had I known the legacies were gonna recover from 2020 as well as they had, I probably would have made a better effort to go there too.

Our contract is a sick twisted joke, and the insane amount of time it takes to change base/equipment/seat here is only one example.

A year ago things were looking great, but now the company has expressed that they have no intention of compensating us for the BS we deal with.

Anyone coming here, please be aware that the company can revise you on a trip an unlimited amount of times without major penalty (you might get 1-3 extra hours of extra pay, IF you are lucky, but not guaranteed).

You can also be extended 84hrs into days off (yes, THREE AND A HALF DAYS) at the end of a trip, even if you're a line-holder.

If you end up on a fleet that goes to China, you're going to spend a lot of time being exposed to carcinogenic disinfectants sprayed on everything and you will be locked in a hotel room with the only extra compensation you get being an extra $100 per 24hrs that goes into a worthless "bank" that you can't even spend on room service.

There's a lot of other areas of our contract that lag behind the legacies in a massive way and unfortunately our pilot group is not well educated on that. A lot of guys here think we have the best of everything because they haven't been paying attention to what everyone else has been gaining in their contracts. We do have some great nuggets like having a real retirement plan plus a B fund (which is capped pretty low btw), good vacation, no PBS, and a few other things, but as far as everything else goes, we're lagging pretty hard and our current negotiators aren't even asking for QOL right now. Just $$$ and retirement.

 

I’m not ruling out making the jump. Dusting off the ol resume and updating the logbook. It used to be that there were a fair number of folks from Legacy airlines coming to FedEx. That trend may be reversing if a bunch of stuff isn’t fixed in our contract.


Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a huge proportion of folks who blindly believe we have the best of everything. They fail to accept that other places have it better than we do and demand that we make changes to come up to industry standard. I agree with you on the items we have that are better. Those things shouldn’t be overlooked but far too many people use that fact to dismiss the other areas where we lag so far behind.

Us failing to demand significant QOL improvements will be our demise. We went after pay and retirement and it doesn’t even seem like that is going to impress anyone given some of the other numbers already agreed to at other places.


Bottom line, new folks have choices right now. That hiring pool they talk about may drain faster than they think as pilots decide to take or stay at the Legacy job they already have. Purple isn’t the slam dunk choice any more. Sadly, I don’t think management cares.