flyn2001

This is golden advice! I target 90 TFPs (usually seem to end up with about 100-105 after a JA or trip fluctuations). Good ELITT ninja skillz will allow you to do that by working 12-13 days per month and having most weekends off.

Enjoy your time off....the best way to get 2nd yr pay...wait until 2nd yr!

mahana

How much is pay during training and is hotel paid by the company? Thanks!

flyguy81

Hotel paid by company. You get guarantee during training...close to $6k/mo

barabek

Can someone please explain the difference between trip pay versus hourly pay. I understand the pay rates here at APC are converted from $/trip to $/hour. What does this mean? Are you guys not paid by the hour? I'm sorry if this is explained somewhere on this forum, I just can't find it. Is the pay scale on APC the most current rate? Thanks for answering!

tacamoflyer

No. It isn't.
Holidays and one offs aside, reserve is almost always a bad deal. You generally fly out of the open time pool and reroutes are all too common. Getting released by scheduling is hit or miss even when you aren't legal to do any more flying.
It is still a B scale for pay, although not nearly as bad as before. A lot of our pay here is earned on reroutes and move ups. While a lot of guys detest them, I generally love them. It is more often than not more money for less work. That means I can enjoy more days at home later.
Holiday reserves rarely get touched. As part of the "old southwest culture", nobody really calls in sick on holidays and the flying is usually pretty light on the actual holiday.
Even if I lived 10 minutes from the pilot lounge, I wouldn't pick up or bid any reserve unless it was on a day with high reserve coverage and no disruptions.

tacamoflyer

This scenario has happened to a few guys on the forum that I saw. When scheduling was called on it, they removed the flying from their board since it is a violation of the contract. Of course, there is no penalty to them for this "mistake". It seems the common practice there is to throw the flying on someone and hope it sticks. If it doesn't, just pick the next target.

tacamoflyer

Monthly guarantee, so around 87 tfp at 67.32.
The hotel is paid for and is single occupancy (thank SWAPA, it is in the contract). Our new hire hotels are pretty nice.

Gilligan13

I was basing it on getting paid to sit home. Sounds like at the right base that's possible. Is reserve guarantee 79 hours a month?

tacamoflyer

TFP hearkens from the Herb days when they were bouncing around Texas in the 200. It is a calculation that was formerly based on the distance it takes to go from Dallas to Houston being one TFP. As our stage length got longer and operation more complex, this morphed into a time/distance equation that few understand completely. The common conversion that is accepted by the union is that 1 credit hour = 1.149 TFP.
This is always to the southwest pilots advantage, as long stage lengths pay always better using the TFP calculation. Short flights can as well, although not as much.

tacamoflyer

They can and will get around this by notifying you out of domicile and making it an unscheduled overnight. They will not give you a straight up JA (make it back at the end of your pairing and get notified of flying the next day).