30 EWR 737 FO and 30 EWR 320 FO.

 

New guy here.

I would make some "assumptions" as to what that means and how it came to be but instead I will ask.....

Does that mean UAL is short at least 60 bodies company wide, and specifically 60 bodies short at EWR?

Did these vacancies come from retirements or equipment transfers since the last bid?

And/or are there other meanings to this that a concerned employee would have?
Thanks in advance for the education.

 

Combination of those.

Most of it is because those two positions are the lowest paying ones, so when pilots get opportunities to move to higher paying equipment, they bid up.

Also EWR is the most junior base and many pilots have bid out of there over the last few years to LAX, SFO, GUM, CLE, DEN, IAH, ORD, and IAD.

Yes we are 60 bodies short, but normally that just a month of hires. I think the problem is that we have a training backlog.

The main reason for this bid is this is just a rebid of previously vacant positions, and there is a time limit to award unfilled bids to new hires.

So new hires will be getting mostly guppy and fifi positions out of EWR and then have to bid over to the other bases when they can.

Normally this doesn't happen, but its because of the furlough recall with lots of guys coming back into their previous base.

I'll be by next year there will be 3 or 4 bases new hires can go. Probably EWR, IAH, ORD, and SFO. They are generally larger bases and traditional new hire bases for both legacies.

Hope that helped.

 

Im trying to understand this as well. As a new guy on the bus in Ewr, when I started a few months ago I saw a total of 65 EWR bus FOs. Today there are a total of 92 with several being TDYed from other bases. Only thirty some guys got lines in March and there are very few trips in open time month to month. So why are they TDYing bus FOs to EWR when there are 50 some guys on reserve? There are less than 60 captains and nearly 100 FOs. Now this bid comes out with 30 more vacancies. What am i missing?

 

DEN and ORD are shrinking as Bus bases. IAH and EWR are growing. This was put out on the Flight Ops News back on the late fall. This was a long term plan. So my guess is that they want to get the base up to the number of bodies they need and then "turn on" the extra flying, rather than let it grow naturally.

It has to do with the Bus being able to do the transcons without removing pax and so they want them based on the "coasts" and let the guppy do the short flying. Just like they announced they are removing the guppy from some of the Hawaii flying and putting more mid-body airplanes on those routes.

 

What's a mid body? Is it a narrowbody airplane with big aspirations?

 

Recent bids have put a lot of LUAL FOs in the left seat, creating a lot of backfill FO vacancies along with the leftover vacancies and simply understating issues.

 

They seem to be doing a lot of Florida stuff with the bus right now. And the are always breaking. JetBlue seems to get back and forth way more consistently.

Mechanics don't like seeing them down there, and apparently they don't have spare parts for them.

Also the airbus doesn't seem to have tvs. Don't think that'll work for a transcon

 

1. Breaking? Pure Crap. The bus is very reliable. Maintenance is only as good, or as poor as Wacker wants it to be.

2. Spare Parts...whose responsibility is that? Airbuses's or Jeff's?

3. TV's. See number two above. The only busses without movie screens are the ones the new UCAL management team has retrofitted with the crap seats and without entertainment. More cheap pizza.

 

Yes, but Godfather, forgive me for my trespasses for I have sinned....


It's still not a Boeing.