Hey the mighty Guppy is a 1960'd POS with new lipstick but we get some of the best flying in the system so I wouldn't say it's one of the 4 horseman. It's just a conscious choice of enjoying life when I get there vs the nice comfy plane that takes me podunkville.

EWR - You couldn't give me GUM override to fly out of there but to each there own.

Commuting to reserve = New hire or Glutton for punishment!

In that case, I encountered all four many years ago and I can truly say, I agree with you.

Yes, EWR 737 CA is horrible, don't do it!

Especially if you're senior to me. :)

Seriously I like jr reserve captain but I live in base and slack off. I don't chase the $$ anymore.

I did a year of commuting to reserve, picked up on aggressive pick up, and some months did better schedule wise then jr lineholders. I'm still a fairly Jr line holder commuting to EWR and with a little schedule tweaking I'm already as of our last June paycheck almost at 200k gross for the year, so the money definitely is good if you want to work. I know a few guys who bid reserve for weekends off and pickup on aggressive and seem to like it.

This is a bit of kettle meeting pot as I have never shied away from a little braggadocio when I thought it was acceptable, BUT there is another side to the high W2. Working "hard" i.e. over 75 hours reduces the number of pilots the company needs. When I started in '96 schedules over 80 hours were rare in fact anything over 85 hours went into the "bank" and didn't get paid until the following month. We need to be careful about how "hard" we work because WHAT IF that data was used to increase the required hours. That, to me, would be a HUGE loss in QoWL.

I try to work my schedule somewhat as well and as of today's check the YTD was a little north of 165k.. (that's with everything, profit sharing, per diem, etc.. Taking out profit sharing makes it more like 135k).

How many days off are you averaging with the "tweaking"? Are you working your ass off or still have decent days off? I've managed to keep my average days off a month pretty high.

I like money..er.. my CFO does.. but I don't want to kill myself getting it.

(Don't worry, I'm probably junior to you :D)

I don't know his answer, which is why I posted right above this one, but there is definitely a difference between working hard vs "smart". Soft time from trips dropped due to conflict, VDO, etc doesn't mean a pilot is necessarily flying 95hrs a month. On reserve on the 777 I could fly two trips, 60hrs, and because of the VDO system and short calls I could have 105-107hrs of pay for 8 days of flying.

Or should we all be limited to 80hrs? If 80hrs provides X number of jobs, why not make it 70 or even 60hrs of pay as a cap?


I post this with the caveat that no one is on furlough or there are pending furloughs.

I fall short on the big W2 contest but I do pick up some extra time. I'm banking all of that money and will be dropping time to fly a lighter than average schedule the next time there's furloughs.

While my extra flying today reduces current headcount, my reduced flying when there are furloughs will reduce the number of furloughs.

As far as increasing the required number of hours, that's already spelled out in section 5. Question for anyone: the lower limit that one could drop down to used to be 50 hours. I can't find that in the contract anymore. Anyone know how low one can drop their schedule down to?

Check 20-P-1-h

You can drop below 50 with company concurrence. But CCS isn't programed to prevent you from dropping below 50 right now. That will be fixed shortly.