Times are a changin'


30 years ago any pilot on reserve was prepared to get a call 24/7 and go to work when asked. When the Titanic sank the corporation sent a bill to the families of the crew for the uniforms. Thankfully workers rights continue to improve. I hope that in the future reserve will be voluntary and pilots will be able to self certify that they are rested and simply pick up open trips, but ultimately the company needs to keep the operation running and every once in a while there will be a trip nobody wants and we signed up for that job. If we are not safe to fly because we are fatigued that's simple, but declining trips because you don't want to work is a different story and something I feel might be happening now.

When you took introductory Latin at Dartmouth, did you cover the term non sequitur?

Because contrary to all the “seniority is everything” vibe at United, most of the younger generation recognizes that it’s bull crap. Everyone deserves to have good QOL, not just the people who have been with United the most. If the QOL of reserve increases, then everyone can be happier. CA’s who don’t want to work much can sit at home more on RSV, junior pilots who want to grind can take a 90 hr line.

Reserve should not be a punishment. Idk how so many people come to the conclusion that it’s fair to your fellow employees to let them have worse QOL just because they got hired after you.

FIFY. Allowing more than about 2 without consent changes jack squat from the current level of stupid. Reserve by its nature will always carry a level of suck. That is inevitable. What can be fixed is how much non-essential suck it has to carry. If one needs to be converted more than about twice we start getting to the point of just mandating they use the provision to build an entire biddable line of SC or FSB.

how about a max % of pilots in BES on reserve. January is red every single day in EWR 737. There were months where I’d see 97 pilots on reserve but they’re red by like 50 Insane.

The reason everything is red is we give complete control to the company to set the min level of reserves. Ergo they get to pick any old number they want which as you can see always seems to exceed how many they have. The solution to that is to require them to be transparent with the actual number of reserves they need and back that number up. I’m pretty sure the required reserves in SFO756 every day actually exceeds the number of 756 departures each day. How the hell does that work?

there are two separate issues at play.

Number of folks in reserve is mostly a function of staffing, amount of flying and LPA. Depending on the BES there is only so much flying and with min LPA values you can end up with an “excessive” number of folks on reserve.

the other issue is min reserve required. The company sets and manipulates those to shut down drops / trip trading.

this is something that should be addressed with Tumi 3.0. When trading opens min tea reserves should not exceed available reserves, I.e. it should never be negative. If they feel they are short they need to up their staffing or push flying to somewhere else.

Not saying junior should have a bad quality of life. But absolutely senior should have a better QOL than junior. Otherwise what is the point of seniority? Yes you should be rewarded for more service and contributions to the company than the guy that got hired yesterday. But I guess the current generation getting hired has boxes of childhood participation trophies from in their closet.

There it is folks. How about making the career better for everyone at every seniority level. Make the reserve work rules better you might convince more people to upgrade.

I don’t see this as a ALPA to company negotiations issue, but the other way around. Enticing upgrades is a company problem that they should solve. Spending negotiating capital to fix their problem where it could be applied to QoL improvements elsewhere isn’t a junior vs senior issue.