Are you serious? Your "rest" seat can be three coach seats?

 

Except on the 737 where it states in the Operations Manual it must be Seat 1B in 1st class. So do 8+ EWR-Carribean turn and you will get a 1st class seat. Fly 9 hours from TXL-EWR on the 757, you just might be in coach. Guess what airplane the snake who negotiated our last contact held captain on? Well at least before he ran to management a few months later.

 

Not sure what you mean by "100% 767." Most of our European flying is on the triple with one or two 747-400 trips (SFO-FRA). What concerns me most is who is going to be doing this flying?

 

I read last year that Newark accounted for the highest number of fuel emergencies in the country which was attributed to 757 flying to Europe.

 

Not using the IRO both ways is a disgrace, but your generalizations are not quite right. About 1/2 of our eastbound europe use 3 man crews. There isn't a good reason why some do and some don't. The min fuel stereotype is way overblown. It happened a lot at the beginning, but for whatever reason things have been much better. Just flew last week block 9:10 and landed with 10k which is pretty good in a 75.

 

This is one of the MANY important things we must lock down in the CBA!! No way we should go backwards on UAs rest rules/facilities. Heck, we won't even allow a 757 first class seat to be used for rest!

Re. the crossfleeting, maybe this is a bit of an opporunity to highlight how much their delay is going to cost them. CAL crews flying out of UA bases and vice versa has to cost SOMETHING. The reliability for the flights will drop since they won't have the reserve crews or spare airframes available. That should show up as more than a minor 'blip' on their expense sheets.....

As for the apparent widebody 'sucking sound' in EWR.... As a DCA guy, replacing a missing 767 flight with a 757 ain't gonna cut it. The block hours will drop and (I'm assuming the 757 pay will split from the 767...) my base pay will drop. I expect some kind of protection from the adverse effects of that kind of movement! I will accept the SLI results without complaint, I want as few fences as possible, and I want mixed crews to fly as soon as reasonable. BUT I expect that my current status quo won't change too much! That means I should be able to fly the type of trips and schedules I currently fly, I don't have to commute to do that, and my pay will stay in the same relative position on the payscale!

Thanks for tolerating my rant

 

Safety at CAL is secondary to making money for the kings at the top. Of course, our union is absolutely the best friend of management...........just look at PBS (seniority was given away at a MAJOR cost to our pilots.....thanks to CALALPA and the "dynamic bid model that we HAD to have has done nothing but screw us royally))........our rest seat was given to management (thanks CALALPA), and then we complain about how we're being treated after we've negotiated our perks (if you can call them that) away. Funny how we provide management with the whips to beat us, and then wonder why they're whipping us. Every month we're so **** poorly staffed it's not even funny, but then we're told we're overstaffed, and offer JM'ing opportunities due to lack of bodies, along with VRF lines to compensate for "overstaffing". What a joke.............and then the BOD thinks these folks deserve more money................

 

Hopefully our "CBA" will move faster than molasses, but it's not looking that way. Maybe when our United bretheren step up to the plate and show CAL pilots how its REALLY done, things will change. Until then, expect the beatings to continue.................. Yep, 6 hour four day pairings never looked so good! Wonder how many folks in our management would be willing to work four days for 6 hours of pay????

 

The only guy that should ever fly a 6 hour four day trip is a reserve. The ONLY.

 

Sorry........gotta disagree with you on that statement. If a reserve has been busting his butt and gets up to around 68 hours or so, then is awarded a 6 hour four day trip, he's literally getting paid only 1.5 hours a day. Since we have no trip rigs, he's getting even MORE screwed than a lineholder. (When we get to withing 4.5 hours of our paycap, the company goes into "screw this guy" mode). This type of abuse has been going on at CAL for quite some time and needs to come to a grinding halt. We are pretty productive, but lately the "airport appreciation time" and minimum paying 4/5 day trips have been on the increase. Duty rigs for line holders AND reserves HAVE to be a part of the answer, along with the flushing of PBS down the toilet. The problem I have with this being only a "reserve" trip, is that many of our lineholders think the reserve pilots deserve NO LIFE, NO MONEY, and NO SYMPATHY. Yet PBS is completely violating seniority, so junior guys are holding lines while more senior guys are getting shafted on reserve. There's no need for a four day 6 hour trip in the first place without pay protections in place.