EMSpilot135

I'm a rotor guy that's looking into TSA. I had a couple questions to see if anyone currently with the company could answer.

What Domicile selection like? I'm wanting STL, they are telling me its not a "very senior" base and if I didn't get it out of ground I'd be looking at moving there in maybe two months. Does that sound realistic? Sorry, the Army has given me trust issues.

What's the schedule like? Anyone that has a family have any input on what home life is like if you are not commuting?

Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Metering

Domicile selection, like with any airline, is going to be based on a pyramid. The three points of the pyramid are, in priority order: Where the company needs pilots, What your seniority can hold, Where you want to go.

When you do your first day or so of indoc, you will be given an employee ID number and a seniority slot will be assigned to you based upon the last four digits of your SS. The smaller the last four digits are, the higher class seniority you have. 1234 would be senior to 5678 for example. You will also be given a sheet called a Standing Bid. On this sheet you will be able to list your preferred domiciles in descending order. So you would put STL in the top slot, then ORD (for example), then IAD etc etc.

Normally, everyone in a class is automatically assigned to the base that is in the most need of first officers at the time you started. Its not uncommon to see an entire class be assigned to RDU, or DEN, or ORD or any base, really. Don't be alarmed if you weren't assigned your domicile of choice just yet. You still have almost two months of training to complete. Every month on around the 7th to the 10th, the company publishes a "Change / Transfer" notice. This is when they look at the needs of the company, compare those on the standing bid master lists with where they want to go and then they shift people around based upon vacant positions and pilots seniority.
St. Louis isnt our most popular base among the new hires so I would say that there is a good chance you could hold it out of training. If not you should get it within a few months of commuting. What is important is to make sure that your second preference on your Standing Bid sheet is one that is easy to commute to out of STL, like Chicago.

As far as the schedule on reserve... Your mileage may vary. However, if you live in your domicile I found that reserve isn't that bad. You will have 11 days off in the month. Some months you may find yourself spending a few of your "ON" days sitting at home and no one calls you. You might be assigned to drive in to the airport and sit airport reserve for 8 hours and then drive home at the end of your shift. Those months are very pleasant. Other months, you will feel like you are in a whackamole game and Crew Scheduling is the mallet. Every time you go back to work they hit you with repo flights, deadheads to catch a deadhead only to get to where you are going to find a broken plane and time out only to deadhead home the next morning, think you are going home only to be assigned to sit airport reserve when you get there and then be assigned another deadhead to repo a plane from ORD to DEN... But whats important to remember, is that this condition isn't unique to Trans States. That's how it is on reserve at any regional airline.

Overall I have spent about two years on reserve here combined (about 6 months as a first officer and a year and a half as captain). I have lived in base and commuted to reserve as well and while commuting to reserve will make you hate this job very quickly, living in base on reserve isnt that bad if you can find a way to ride out the unpredictable tides of crew scheduling.

staysafe

Wow, that is great information. With regards to reserve, how much does seniority factor in when someone is on reserve at TSA? In other words, is a more senior FO on reserve going to have more “at-home” days or less airport reserve, etc.? Or is the punishment served equally to all regardless of seniority?

Metering

Seniority and a few other factors come in to play but cant reliably predict your home time vs away time.

Reserves are called out in reverse seniority order. That means that the most junior pilot on call that day will be activated first, then the next and the next. There are a few exceptions to this...

1) A senior pilot who opts to "volunteer to fly" or volunteer for airport reserve will be called out or activated before a pilot more junior than them.

2) The company can ignore the reverse seniority thing if the more senior pilots schedule better fits the flight assignment that they are trying to cover.

The amount of home days vs away days really comes to down to how short staffed the company is as a whole at any given point. Few are the days that you will be on home reserve. Normally they will activate you to come in to the airport for airport reserve in the very least. The good thing about that is that you credit 5 hours of pay towards your min monthly guarantee.

To expand on our reserve schedules:

Long Call Reserve (LCR): You are on call 24 hours a day but they must give you a 12 hour call out if they want to assign anything to you.

Short Call Reserve (RP 1,2,3)
You are on call for a 14 hour chunk of the day and have a 2 hour call out to get to the airport. The shifts start at 4AM (RP1), 7AM (RP2) or 10AM (RP3). If you are on RP and they dont use you by 6 PM on your last day of reserve, you are released to go home.

Airport Reserve (AR 1,2)
You are at the airport, with your bags and uniform ready to head to the gate at the drop of a hat. The shift is 8 hours long and you credit 5 hours that go towards your monthly guarantee. There are two AR shifts. AR1 goes from 5AM to 1PM (7AM to 3PM in IAD) and AR2 goes from 1PM till 9PM.

When the schedules come out there is a window of a few days where you can email the Futures desk to submit your preference of reserve assignment for the month.

staysafe

Thanks for the explanation. What does the schedule bidding look like? Specifically, once you hold a line, is there SAP, how easy is it to drop/trade and what is the minimum required monthly fight hours? Thanks again.

staysafe

I have read back in the threads and am trying to understand how the bidding system is working now at TSA. Is PBS in full effect? If so, how has that impacted picking up and dropping trips? How much flying/credit can you actually achieve in a month? Conversely, how thin can you make your schedule? Can you drop below minimum guarantee?

Rmk1991

PBS is in full effect. Overall, pilots have felt positively towards it. There is less open time overall with PBS due to it's ability to schedule more trips for people. The company however recently picked up a little bit of extra flying and with our attrition there is lots of flying that can be picked up. I'll usually pick up a long day trip that's 6.something hours and with premium brings it up to just under 10. I got lucky this month and had it be critical so i'm getting 175% on it. My average month is 15 days off with about 60 block hours of actual flying. Credit with our min day guarantee for that month will be mid to high 80s. I'll pick up a day trip or a 2 day trip where I'll start late on day 1 and head to an overnight and on day 2 knock out a 5 leg day or a 3 leg day with a long turn to finish and credit ~15 hours for the 2 day. Doing that the past few months has brought my average monthly credit to about 102.5. I could easily work more and credit into the 120/130 range if I really wanted but I really enjoy my time off. You can drop below guarantee, however you will get paid less than guarantee if you choose to do so. The ability to drop is based off of staffing. If you try and drop a trip on a day, scheduling will wait until 10 days prior to the trip and figure out if the reserve coverage meets a specified percentage of the total pilots in the base and approve the drop if the coverage is met. Right now, for FOs that isn't super common. I've tried to drop a few things and have had it denied, but that's just in my base. Friends of mine have had more success in another base. I hope this helps!

Wbrady755

New to the airline world... What is PBS??

I’m looking at doing the rotor transition... I’m interested in TSAir for a few reasons, most notably for their DEN base. What are the realities of even getting Denver. I live in Fort Worth. Would I be commuting for a year? I’ve seen that commuting to Denver can be... difficult...

RgrMurdock

Line Bidding takes all available pairings or trips constructs them into a full line of flying for the month. For us the company used to do this process with minimal oversight from the pilot group. Pilots would bid on those lines based on their seniority. PBS uses pilot preferences to construct lines out of the available pairings that exist when the pilot bids. Senior pilots can select specific pairings while more junior pilots will not have a lot of options because most pairings have been taken by senior or mid level line holders. If you have good work rules, which we do, PBS can be a great thing. If you have poor protections and bad work rules then PBS can be a bad thing. QOL has gone up for most pilots under PBS.

CC150

I am looking at starting in the fall, does anyone have the current information as to what the length of sitting reserve is out of training right now?

Also that detailed post did a great job explaining the factors going into domicile selection, is there any updated information on what is junior or will I just have to wait and see?