You are kidding, right? I spent my whole career specifically bidding for cities I wanted to layover in. I had the chance to do some pretty cool things on my overnights, like skiing in the Alps and surfing in Hawaii, biking to a distillery in Scotland and mountain biking along the river in YEG. Concerts, running in cool places, eating great food. That's what I enjoyed. He'll, I'm still doing that in my retirement gig, although I have less control over where I go.

I had more time with my kids than most fathers who were ¨home every night¨. I look at my son, who is a lawyer and leaves the house at 7 am and doesn't get home until 8PM. If your wife can't handle minor **** while you are gone then it s going to be an issue even if you are gone all day. Good thing you are not military and are deployed for 9 months (Or longer).

Great thing about this profession is you can choose how much or how little you fly. The bigger the airline (or other operation) you fly for, the more choices you have.

 

Not all, but some. The nature of widebody flying is such that you won’t typically be staying in places like Billings. You’ll be in Haneda, Paris, Johannesburg etc.

You’ll be in large cities with rich cultural histories and lots of things to do 24/7. That’s not to say Munich is fresh and exciting every time, but you can’t really compare a domestic two day with a Tampa layover to a widebody trip to Berlin.

So yes, people do bid for layovers. When you’ve got 5 days to relax down-route, wives and girlfriends can come along for the holiday.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my domestic layovers a ton (TPA, SAN, ORD are great cities), but international flying is a different vibe.

 

No, he's not kidding

Nobody here is "skiiing in the Alps" on a layover. We are walking over to the starbucks near the airport marriott BWI to get a coffee on our 13.5 hour layover before heading back to work.

Seriously dude, read the room...[/size]

 

I am reading the room. He made a statement that people don't bid for layover cities. And this is a thread about attrition, people leaving NK. There is a different world out there. I certainly understand that not everyone can leave but there are many who can. I really hope it works out for you folks.

I do know that Spirit had some great contract elements. But sometimes those parts of the contract that drive the scheduling optimizer to creating the most efficient pairings results in many shorter layovers, as well as marketing for how the flights are placed into the cities. That drives layover length as well.

 

Plenty of senior captains are way too cheap. My wife parks in the terminal garage when she does back to back day trips. Doing a day trip that's half an hour to 45 minutes shorter would almost always pay less than the cost of parking. She's pretty senior at 20 years. To each their own. I always park employee, because I'm gone for 4 days.


Also, any updates on attrition??

 

Agreed cactusmike
My airline has former NK guys. All great guys. The one thing I’ve constantly heard is that they were surprised at how good the QOL is. For sure, it’s not as good as the contract at NK, but it’s not as bad as they thought it’d be.



My goal in posting here is not to kick the NK pilots while they’re down. It’s to let the ones on the fence know that they may be working with some inaccurate information.

 

I assume it’s picked up quite a bit considering the furlough cancellations were barely single digits in early December and blew out to 49 with 27 downgrade cancellations last week alone.

 

I read the FAQ about the cancellations and it seemed to say they're going to do this every week; Wednesdays to be precise. I didn't get any email at all on Friday so I'm assuming I wasn't awarded a downgrade cancellation this round. Maybe next week.

 

just to be clear, the only things NKs CBA has that is better than any other airline is Red/Green and ability to drop most everything. The downside of that is Junior guys got absolutely fisted because of it. 4 days off was nice but most everyone waived it.

If They can hold on to Red/Green as it stands today, in a merger with F9, that would be awesome.

one other thing, Spirits Healthcare is better than UALs (at least for me and my family and where we live) and I believe better than Dals & AAs…….

(not LTD etc but just straight up healthcare)

 

Healthcare is much better at AA with various options. My quality of life went up quite a bit at AA vs Spirit, mainly because the operation runs much smoother on average. As far as days off and trip trading, I was able to bid for the days off I wanted after around 9 months on property.

Trip trading is worse than Spirit, no question, but it has steadil Improved.