Deicing, Delays, Door Codes & Thunderstorms.

Every time I start to think about upgrade, I just repeat the above little ditty. If that's not enough to snap me back to my senses, I envision myself sitting in IAH (or ORD) for 3.5 hours watching Faux news.

That usually gets my mind right real quick.

Usually accompanied by white New Balance shoes (Velcro optional) and the world's biggest cell phone holster.

Life as a NB Captain at UAL? It is a moving target, just like everything else. I have had the best airline job in the world as a NB Captain (now, at my BES), and I have had one of the worst, 13 years ago.

Over the last 21 years I would say it has been 50/50. The answers you receive about life on reserve as a NB Captain, may be completely invalid next month, next year, or 3 years from now. It might be great everywhere but where you bid. Or you might get lucky and you have it great and it sucks rocks everywhere else.

Any answer to this question, is an answer from the recent past, which means less than nothing 6 months from now.

If you have any other questions about life as a NB Captain, I will field them at this time.

LOL

All the guys sitting around sucking up max shortcalls (including me) can count their lucky stars. That means MP is screwed up, still probably because of the merger. Their goal (a moving target) is to fly everyone to guarantee, and have the reserves fly 90% of guarantee. They are still un-Jeffing the place. If they ever get in phase with everything, they will be tight everywhere, and their will be little Sr or Jr Manning.

That is there goal.

Reserves were flown on about 36% of their days and last year flew 374 hard hours. I'm sure people in the tower see that and say what a waste.

One stat they don't show (or track?) is how many days nearly 100% of reserves flew. Those are the meltdown days when you lose money, business, and the PR battle.

Oh, and 7426 SCs and 918 FSBs in April alone.

I don't know, is the "goal" to fly reserves as close to 100% as possible? Or is the goal to have crews available when needed?

If you start using the reserves as partial line holders you start to loose the flexibility you WILL need from time to time.

Which brings up another question, when there is so much summer flying going on, wouldn't it be better to increase the amount of lines? I believe it's contractual to have a certain percentage of reserves. Wouldn't flexibility in this be something that would benefit both the company and crews?

Yup. Reserves are pilots "in reserve" (!), ready to be used if needed, when needed. When they start pushing up reserve productivity there's a point where they're not reserves anymore, just lineholders scheduled week to week vs monthly.

This happened infamously at CAL in 2003 as they were cutting to the bone to stay out of another BK. A bright idea was one more round of furloughs and the reserves would just fly a lot more. Along came the Iraq war and we didn't have enough pilots for the very lucrative CRAF requests and we lost out on a money maker. Person who came up with the idea was fired.

The way I look at it, Reserves are paid to be on Reserve, period. My job is to be able to answer the phone. As soon as they assign me a trip it screws up that logic. Guy can't answer his phone if he's in the air! I am not paid to go to work, I am paid to stay home and answer the phone. Period. ;)

^^^FTW!!!!

Or rather, paid to look at phone when it rings, let it go to voice mail, check said voicemail and computer :D

OK, Guppy Driver, :p I'll promise not to say "Guppy" if you'll promise not to get "there" and "their" mixed up ever again. ;)