Minimum number of hours you can drop down to?
 

I’m curious what the minimum number of credit hours you can drop down to for each airline and under what conditions. I recently talked with someone from Spirit who mentioned you can drop to zero hours without having to pick up any trips. Does anyone else allow this?

While in theory this is true, in practice, it's a bit more complicated. We have a red/green reserve grid, and any trip that touches a red day can't be dropped, it can only be traded to another pilot. But true that there is no minimum number of credit or block hours one needs to maintain.

At Southwest you can drop down to zero provided you can get other pilots to pick up what you want to drop.

At UPS you can drop as many trips as others are willing to pickup, but you don’t get a good month towards your pension if you drop below 37.5 credit hours

As stated, at NK you can drop all provided adequate reserve coverage. Additionally you can put your trips in open time, SWA style, for other pilots to pick up, again with no requirements to keep any credit.

Frontier allows you to drop to 60 hours credit for half the months and 70 credit the other half. You can drop virtually all of your flying, but you have to pick up to those levels by the end of the month. We have tons of scheduling flexibility but you must end the month with 60 or 70 credit hours. Many people are able to completely change their entire month from the award. Hope that made sense

Aa is zero. Guys will say they cant drop but you can with a lot of work

Delta you can drop to zero. Pretty easy in the categories I've been in if you can hold weekends off. Weekends are usually short staffed but typically you can drop any trips monday-friday

At JB you can drop to 70 into open time (if the reserve grid allows, which it usually doesn’t now), or down to 0 if someone picks it up off the trade board.

Allegiant down to 40

That sounds rough. What happens if you don't build your schedule back up?

Back in the day nothing...they decided to start enforcing it last summer when contract negotiations broke down.

“First, management issued "warning letters" to pilots who have not credited 70 hours in a month. While it's true that the CBA states that a pilot must credit 70 hours by the end of the month, management has not enforced this provision for many years, and told us at the bargaining table that it had no intent to enforce the provision. However, despite the clear past practice that allows pilots to credit less than 70 hours in a month, management has threatened to discipline such pilots.”

I don’t know anyone who has tried since so who knows what they would do now.

That's exactly the kind of work rule that ensured I never applied at Frontier, even when I was unemployed and looking for "anything" to jump-start my airline career. State of the industry today, there's no reason to put up with that kind of crap, but Frontier keeps pushing that style of BS on its employees. As a last resort, I'd bag groceries or deliver pizza before going to Frontier.

More on topic, last Feb I didn't like my schedule and gave away the entire month. Training helpfully (not) scheduled me for my recurrent a month early so I did credit about 25ish TFP for the month, but mostly I enjoyed the month off.

Good for you

This right here for Delta. If you can hold weekends off, there are plenty of vultures to pick up the weekday stuff even in NYC.

That’s hilarious.