This is me also. Some months I unexpectedly fall into a bunch of premium, drop other trips because I’m ahead of the credit curve, and end up called for more premium. The next month I did one very cushy four day and spent the rest of the month floating around in my pool. Still averaged 85 hours between the two months. Even when I don’t have the premium assist I’ll take a mental health month and play hookey. At some point in life the bills are paid and the big checks just change the digits on your account screen, but that time spent home beats all.

That's a strange technique. I just tell PBS what days I want to work in the first place, saves a lot of hassle.

A little, but it works out. I’m not senior enough to hold all weekends from an award standpoint, so this works great

I think many at Spirit feel this way. So would that mean drop to zero saves the company money? Why would they want it gone?

We can only guess, but I think IF they want it gone then it would be because of how they want to run an operation. I think that’s what it boils down to tbh

Many of your own have said that dropping on the weekends is much harder. But if you can't hold "all" weekends, it means you can hold some weekends (off I presume), so if you have some trips on the days you want, why drop EVERYTHING?

At JB the good trips, if there are any, go out of FLICA so fast they often don't generate an alert, or you have seconds, or less, after an alert goes off. I have stalked FLICA for limited periods of time in the past, and it's a miserable existence. So to drop ALL your trips, even the ones on the days you already want to work, and rebuild with the trips that aren't gone in fractions of a second, assuming you aren't flying, sounds miserable. Or, what kind of BOT do you have? Is it the latest version with all the add-ons and features? 1.21 Gigawatts?

Whether a weekend is green or red on the grid is base and seat dependent. I believe CAs are usually red on the weekends since we’re short CAs, but FOs in several bases are green. My particular base is green all month long for the FOs. Keep in mind that if a day goes red, it doesn’t mean it’ll stay red for the remainder of the month. As trips are picked up on that day, the net reserves go up changing the grid from red to green.

The day Daily Open Time DOT opens, everyone is putting their drop requests in. There a ton of trips to choose from to manipulate your schedule. There also seems to have a bunch of trip in OT when the DOT opens as well. Either remnants of trips dropped in IOT or whatever wasn’t awarded. So no bot for me, I do play the game and camp Flica all day the day DOT opens up.

Not everyone drops to zero, but I do. I tend to get awarded a 15 hour 4 day because it ends on a redeye or they threw in a redeye in the middle of the pairing. I don’t do redeyes, so I drop to zero and rebuild. Additionally, our 4 GDO days gives us a weekend or two off so even junior folks get some weekends. Every weekend off, that’s a bit more senior to be awarded, but can be accomplished by dropping trips.

Schedule flexibility is the name of the game with DTZ and game changer for the pilot group

Nothing requires you to drop if you have the trips you want. It's an option.

The ease with which we can drop and pickup trips creates an ecosystem where really good trips are surprisingly common in open time. No bot needed.

I just looked at the first Officer grid for Fort Lauderdale, besides today and tomorrow, the entire month is green by a lot. I could go in and drop the other two weekends right now, if I wanted to, with no hassle. And so could many others. The grid is very green, and that’s the normal not the exception.

I guess I'm used to this weird alternative universe where dudes drop the bad trips and pick up the good ones. This new Spirit universe where all the good trips just sit in open time, where you can just stroll in and grab them whenever you want almost sounds too good to be true.

Then I guess I'm not clear on why you haven't dropped your weekend trips and picked up the great weekday trips that are just sitting there waiting for you? Honest question.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure. Besides, a lot can come up between last day to put in bids and the end of the month. Sometimes it’s just trading one good (but non-commutable) trip for another good (or almost as good) commutable trip that gets you in an hour or two earlier. Saves you a night in a hotel on your own dime.

Big money difference? Not so much. But sleeping in your own bed tonight as opposed to buying a hotel night and losing a morning of time waiting to jumpseat home is not a trivial thing either.

Obviously. But that other trip is gonna look good to someone, and get picked up. Or traded for something worse, and then worse. I've watched a good trip drop (on days I already have a good trip) and within second or minutes it's gone, or traded for something less good. That second trip is traded quickly for something less good. And so on. Anything good is eaten by the hyenas until only the bones are left. "Good" trips are eaten up by seniority in the bid, and then those who couldn't hold those trips because of less seniority eat them when they fall into open time. They never just sit. To suggest they just sit there is to suggest that everyone that couldn't hold those trips originally because of their seniority will now just look at them and go "oh well, I guess I'll just fly the crap my seniority could hold" and not trade for them. And I've watched FLICA enough to know it happens fast.

There's a reason that NK pilot put out the spoof BOT selling website... To deny it is just silly and beyond reasonable belief.

What do you think BOT stands for? Bot… short for robot…

I’m sure we have people with bots, but so did my previous airline. Using a bot is scummy, but I digress.

What would be considered a bad trip at JB?

It's because different people like different things. Your good trips are someone else's garbage, and vice versa. It's a beautiful thing.

Our system maximizes the chance that everyone ends up with something they like.

I'm going to disagree with that partially. A **** trip is a **** trip is a **** trip. We all know what a bad trip is and we all know what a good trip is. Now we may have preferences of types of flying, layovers, report times and computability, but a bad pairing is always going to be clogging up the open time pot and nothing will completely change that.

Yeah, no one likes the 10 hour 3 days with a redeye.

Very rarely in a group of 1500 CAs or FOs are you going to get unanimous agreement as to what is a good or bad trip. But saying nobody can improve their schedule by trading trips is simply crazy. And even if that were true on the day you put your bid in, things change by the time seven weeks go by.. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want the ability to swap their schedule around if new conflicts present themself. And yeah, that may mean dropping to a lower credit value and taking a less desirable trip to make your kid’s soccer game because they made the playoff or something. I don’t know anyone who can reliably predict what dates they want off six or seven weeks out. The ability to drop/swap/pickup. Is as necessary to pilots QOL as many other work rules..

Shhhhhhh… a handful of JetBlue pilots with seniority to bid what they want are drunk on the idea of fat profit sharing checks and no matter how much the varied benefits of drop to zero are extolled to them will scoff, feign disbelief, or otherwise endeavor to poke holes in its value. The merger will eventually get approved. The SIL will go forward within standard deviations of the mean. Eventually we will have a combined NC try to sell us on a JCBA where something has to give. For me, money can always be made but lifestyle can’t be rebought. If a majority tend towards the dollars vs the freedom, it better be so much money that any tears for what we sold are dried by the dollars.

Bingo!

This everyday day of the week!

Hopefully everyone will be happy....
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Here's where you lost me... Who said "nobody"? Who has suggested that we shouldn't have the ability to swap schedules around?

Extreme statements that are yours, and weren't made by me, don't help you make your point.

We ALL want schedule flexibility when something changes. We also know that the trips sitting in open time are most likely not going to be the "cream of the crop". Otherwise someone else with similar preferences would have traded for it. There are commuters and there are locals. Some trips are just gross for both groups... But when you need to swap, you need to swap.

And to the fella who had to bring up "being drunk on profit sharing", we already did most of the heavy lifting for you. You were worried we wanted to trade DTZ or Green Grid rules for profit sharing, even though literally no one said as much. Well, you have been proven wrong already, as we achieved the biggest part of the profit sharing improvement already, as well as creating a new FLOOR for pay and retirement in the JCBA.

I'm glad you're finally starting to understand how it works.

One quick add: we don't have to rely on trades or swaps. We can drop into and pickup from open time directly. Makes it very easy and flexible.

Yeah, we can do that as well, it's just more limited, for now. And no, despite your best efforts, so far I've learned nothing useful that I didn't already know. Nothing positive anyway.

.
​​​​​​ That's a decent point. The Spirit group is worried about the JetBlue group selling out items on the JCBA but our union is already scoring Ws for us behind the scenes. Our newest LOA significantly closed the gap between us and the legacies, and somewhat widened the gap (at least in pay) between B6 and NK. I am not aware of any related heavy lifting going on at NK, but I don't keep up with all the news. Have I missed any developments on the NK side of the table or?
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I would say increased the gap with NK in pay, retirement and profit sharing. The combined company WILL be profitable someday, and the language is now in place to be paid ON TOP of our regular pay, benefits, retirement and QOL.
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The thing most people have on their minds, but don’t talk about it at NK. That said, the LOA y’all scored is huge and cleared up some doubts, at least it did for me.

I don’t expect any gains because our management is coasting. They’re totally checked out and just allowing the airline to survive until the merger is approved. It’s unfortunate, but it’s our current reality

And that’s the truth. Ted and Gang have zero incentive to make a profit and attrition isn’t an issue now that we hire CFIs and we have planes being grounded. Sadly our best opportunity at any “gains” prior to a merger approval will be a VIL LOA like JBLU.

What’s interesting, and nobody talks about, is NK could be back into section 6 negotiations as early as years end and I do believe the NK MEC needs to be getting ready for that as well. The assumption it’s going to be a JCBA isn’t guaranteed, not by a long shot.

The governments biggest argument is based on a selection of routes cherry picked from q3 2021 to q1 2022. The government will attempt to define a market, to argue a section 7 violation (almost the entirety of the basis for the case), through the selection of 51 routes Spirit and JetBlue compete directly on, of which 6 don’t even exist anymore.

The government has attempted to block previous mergers, United and Continental specifically, on the same basis but were shot down as you need to look at the market (read airline route structure) in its entirety and can’t focus on just one specific snapshot of the entire route structure. It’s also been argued that air lines are ever changing in nature and cannot be so narrowly defined into a specific market as they are constantly in motion and always changing. Therefore, it’s hard to argue a section 7 violation due to the nature of an airline being in constant change and adapting its flying to market changes over time.

I think it’s going to be a nail biter, but I wouldn’t call it a long shot. I really think the government case is extremely weak and this has a better chance of passing than we all may have been lead to believe by Elizabeth Warren.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket...s-corporation/

Yeah you nailed it. The DOJ wants to limit this to route by route pricing and not the totality of the entire airline industry. The DOJ even says the agreements with Frontier and Allegiant to divest gates is a worthless endeavor because nothing is guaranteed. This judge doesn't seem like he going to put up with any baloney with the tight schedule and limiting expert witness to one person per subject. DOJ is going all in for some court ruling to facilitate changing antitrust behavior in this country for eternity.

Great read, thanks for sharing. I cant disagree with anything you said here. Bias of course, but to me it looks like JetBlue has a damn good argument. Especially when you consider other ULCCs ready to take over Spirits position, and the government touting JetBlue as a legacy disrupter in that very court house.

I know that you know this, but it should still be stated that any VIL LOA will likely happen if and ONLY if we get to the point where we have tons of CAs sitting around on reserve. And since they operate purely from a reactionary standpoint, before they offer 50 hours of pay they will first ask for voluntary unpaid leave just like during COVID times.

If we go into section 6 negotiations the company will stonewall us for two years just like they always do. During that two year period they will file for bankruptcy or announce a frontier merger. Neither of which have is making any contractual gains for probably 5-8yr imo.

Bankruptcy is going to happen

Haha, the mass exodus will be insane and we'll be ****ting apples instead of trying to eat them.

You should have taken that class date…haha.

I believe AA is still hiring….

I just get hung up on the Spirit Quality of life stuff. I mean Nk is the only airline with QL right 🤔

Yes.



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