not enough copilots. Que the videos....scheduling Swamy from Deli at your service.

There is only one thing that drives employee numbers, that’s demand. If there is no need for a job, it goes away, premium pay trips or not. Your heart is in the right place but at the end of the day UAL is not a charity, and they won’t keep one person more than is needed to run the operation. Same goes for pilots.

This is why we don’t fly PPU trips or volunteer one day off when there are pilots on the street. If they furlough one, then we make the demand such that we make them bring that pilot back. That’s is about the limit we have on controlling jobs... below the wing we have no influence on that.

There will be the selfish Richards out there who are only in it for themselves that will prostitute themselves out regardless of the furlough situation. They can expect to deal with the repercussions from the pilot group, and to be treated like the Richard they are.

Don’t be a Richard.

I’ve been here 25+ years, and pilots not picking up PP trips or not accepting SRM has never resulted in the company bringing back pilots before they were ready to. They would just cancel the trip, and that pilot income opportunity would be gone. Plus many pilots have been forcibly downgraded in pay, and they will want to make up for that. Everything done within the limits of the contract is fair game. If ALPA wants new rules, they can agree to them contractually with the company, otherwise its status quo.

If you are advocating taking an action against the company that is not something we have been regularly and notoriously been doing for the past 5+ years, then you can do that yourself. I will operate no differently than I have in the past, unless ALPA puts out something official. “Official” means published by the MEC. Not an individual pilot spreading his personal agenda.

If you are actually concerned with furloughees coming back then the best thing you can do to help is to make sure that the company is doing well operationally and financially so that the company will grow to a point where they need to recall furloughed pilots. Making it difficult on the company is not going to get them to act in the way you are suggesting. If we are doing poorly, we are either going to set ourselves up for a merger which, as you may have noticed, does not work out well for furloughed pilots or management will want to further shrink to become profitable.

I see no issues with making sure we are doing well financially as a company, so as to bring back our furloughed pilots as fast as possible, and if in doing so the company is being forced to pay pilots more because of their poor planning, then that its a win-win.

In other words, count on 02pilot as one who will be picking up the PP SRM trips.

Hard caps with no pay bank; everything above the caps goes into the furlough fund. That will fix most of that problem.

Yup.

Establish a CAP high enough that guys who want to work harder can earn more, but low enough to clip the wings of those really playing the game, while also removing the company's incentive to intentionally understaff and furlough additional pilots.

Essentially, the reward for picking up high credit PP trips is additional days off, not $$$, once the CAP is reached.

And so what if he does? He's not the problem, dude. The company and it's weak-*** leadership is the problem. As others have mentioned, ALPA could fix this if they wanted to. They don't want to. We haven't made them. Fly the contract and mind your own business.

I'm going to end up moving from the front left quadrant of our cockpit to the right rear quadrant, on reserve before further displacements and likely ultimate furlough. As a commuter, you can bet I'll use APU to secure a commutable trip to avoid hotel expenses associated with a short call. Are your opinions going to pay for my hotel bills? Is reserve a choice? Are you going to put me on some list of people who need to be ostracized because my contractually legal behavior didn't conform to your personal opinion?

Again, mind your own damn business and I'll see you in the unemployment line.

So I start the month with a 70 hour line.

I am able to drop a trip that was 20 hours (didn’t like the trip, needed a day off, etc)

I’m now at 50 hours.

Later on I decide to get back to the 70 hours, and go into CCS and lo and behold there is a 20 hour trip that’s also PP (50, 75, 100%)

You’re saying I should not pick the trip up, and just wait for a straight time 20 hour trip?

there are already limits on average line value when people are on furlough. That already puts a damper on staffing too lean.

Correct, that helps, but that doesn't address what happens after PBS.