I can see both sides of this coin. As I said before it’s not a given that every month that a pilot who bids to a junior base to hold a line will be able to dump their whole schedule and rebuild out of base, particularly if their award is heavy on weekends or holidays.

If they are able to drop and add in the base they can’t hold a line however, unless B6 has some hard and fast reserve language, the company can easily side step adding more reserve pilots by building reserve assignments from other bases. I’ve flown with a number of reserve FO’s from other bases recently on a four day to staff my three day.

There may be pitfalls or unexpected consequences that need to be considered, but to say it “shouldn’t even be discussed” is also short sighted.

Reduction 4-5 day trips ??? What game are this ALPA people playing?

it depends on what bases those reductions where in.

if the reductions came from mco fll lax then everybody is happy.

if they came from jfk then Probably not. It’s why trip distribution needs to be base specific.

That's a Bingo...

I’m all for this. I understand the comments about seniority list abrogation, but at the same time, having such a system in place would also change system bidding behavior.

Mid-range folks stuck on reserve near home in a senior base might consider bidding a junior base to hold a line, if they knew there would be a decent chance of swapping back into some trips in the senior base close to home. I sure as heck would.

It’s basically Econ 101: over time, base seniority stats will eventually compensate for any temporary skew where junior lineholders in junior bases are using their “lineholder” status to end up flying 3/4 of their sched out of the senior base.

Any temporary abrogation of seniority would be limited to reallocations of block hours systemwide. That basically already happens, because the company has a decent degree of flex regarding where they allocate block.