If Oscar really wanted us to say good bye, then negotiate and put it in the contract. Which means 15 min more pay, duty day, and longer connect times to subsequent flights. Not to mention possible legality issues the next flight in the morning.

Doubt that will happen. Till then, it's voluntary, and un paid. Kind of like the starting report times, I don't work for free. I don't flight plan on the bus to the airport. If they want it, they know to negotiate for it.

Enforce the contract, insist on it!

22 pages of a really dumb thread.

It’s to the point where readers and posters won’t even check to see if it’s already been written down earlier.

It’s a “perpetual motion machine!”

Pilots that say this are wrong. The FOM clearly states that the Captain is the on site leader from the time he shows up at the gate until he releases the crew after block in. The ops/zone folks, gate agents, ramp, f/a’s all fall under the Cap’s authority. Perhaps pre merger before this language was codified in the FOM, some folks other than the Captain thought it was their airplane, but those days are looong gone. Don’t just take my word for it, check it out for yourself.

I think it's a cultural thing airline to airline. I've been at a few, currently at Delta, and I'd say 80% of the time one of us says good-bye to the pax...typically whoever flew that leg (so we can revel in all the sarcastic 'nice landing' comments when we slam it on).

However, last leg of a trip if one of us has a tight commute or has somewhere to be then we won't hang around. Or if we have a short overnight or something.

Of course there's always the 5% of weirdo captains who HAVE to greet every single passenger every time, or the ones who pretty much knock the first class passengers over as they bolt out of the flight deck and up the jet bridge as soon as the brake is set.

Can't believe there are 20+ pages on such a simple topic here. Also can't believe I'm adding more :D

Spot on.
After my flights this last weekend, I actually tried to do the buh-bye thing. The only way that I could be ensured to say goodbye to the F pax (the ones that really matter in terms of revenue), I had to have the FO run the parking checklist while I was standing.

Nope, this whole idea of saying buh-bye to the pax isn't my cup of tea, especially by the time the door's open, half the pax (the most important pax, F and E+) are already on the jetway or in the terminal.

If some here like to do this, more power to you.

That brings up an interesting point. The debrief is an SOP now. If you debrief right away you won’t be able to say bye to quite a few pax. If you say bye to all the pax and then debrief after you may well run past the 15 after block in, with 117 implications.

Isn’t the whole idea of profit sharing to incentivize you to provide a better experience for the customer, make the company more money, and improve your PS at year end? Maybe there’s a reason Delta gets double the profit sharing of United. I’ve never heard of Delta pilots complaining about greeting customers.

That is the intended purpose, but Delta also negotiated a different formula than we did to arrive at how they get paid in relation to us. Another profit advantage to Delta is that they farm out a bunch of their widebody flying to codeshare partners. I wish our formula were more like theirs, but not at the expense of giving up a bunch of high paying seats.

Delta is mostly a non-unionized airline. They operate in cities where they can pay their employees much less. Their profits come mostly from that, plus they have farmed out the highest paying pilot jobs to international code-share partners.

Anyone who wants Delta’s annual profit just has to do two things. 1) Convince the other employee groups to leave their unions and take paycuts, 2) Park half our widebody fleet, downgrade all those pilots to lower paying positions, and let Lufthansa and the other carriers do all that flying for us.

Deltas and our profit sharing formulas are almost identical. They get way more than we do strictly because their corporations profits are much higher due to a myriad of reasons. Believe the only big difference is they get the company to make 401k deposits off of the PS where ours doesn't.