OOfff

Find something interesting to do with your weeks off, don’t go undermining our fight for more

Jdub2

Would someone please take the time to give a good explanation of why selling vacation is bad for the pilot group? I don’t doubt that it would be bad to allow it, but I also don’t really understand the implications/reason why

DWC CAP10 USAF

If a pilot flies over their vacation, then the company can execute their schedule with fewer pilots on the seniority list.

For example, if the company wants to fly 100 lines, they need 100 Captains available to fly, but because 10 Capts are on vacation in any given week, they actually have to have 110 Captains on the books.

If pilots were allowed to fly over their vacation, the company could execute that schedule with only 100 Captains

More pilots on the seniority list, more pilots in the category, more people junior to you to act as furlough buffer, etc.

Jdub2

Perfect, succinct and instantly understandable. I appreciate it, thank you DWC

BlueSkies

I'll give it a stab. Imagine if every pilot sold back 1 week of vacation next year, that'd be ~14,000 more weeks of flying the company would get.

So let's be conservative and say during each of those weeks 4 days of flying could be covered. If the average pilot does ~14 days of flying a month or 168 days a year then those 14,000 weeks x 4 = 56,000 days of flying.

56,000 / 168 (avg days of flying per pilot per year) = 334 less pilots needed to cover the schedule. Obviously that is vastly simplified, but hopefully you get the picture. And also hope I didn't make any wrong assumptions/screw up the math.

edit: DWC beat me to it.

jaxsurf

Not only that, but senior pilots would bid for highly desirable vacation weeks with no intent to actually enjoy that vacation because they know they’d be able to easily greenslip during the inevitable meltdown. This prevents someone who would actually enjoy that vacation period from ever having the chance to be awarded those desirable weeks.

Think how ****ed off you’d be if you wanted Thanksgiving off but weren’t senior enough to hold it, only to see that everyone who was awarded a Thanksgiving vacation was out flying. In that scenario those senior pilots would be entitled to do that since it would be in the contract, but at least the way it is now it’s not.

A decidedly lesser negative than the reduced manning requirement, but still a negative.

OOfff

And it’s hard to convincingly argue for more vacation when we don’t take advantage of what we have, so the contractual improvements become slower/impossible

Whoopsmybad

While the manning implications makes sense, I love this explanation way more, and would **** me off way more.

RAH RAH REE

Selling vacation has the exact same outcome as doing greenslips on your day off. Only with vacation you are getting paid triple pay instead of just double. I don't see you guys getting your panties in a wad over greenslips.

and senior guys already bid for holidays off and pick up over them. It's exactly the same.

Also, if you just move or IVD your vacation isn't that still burning the week for someone else? So much hypocrisy.

TED74

The average pilot with five weeks probably doesn’t want another one, particularly if it’s going to be assigned in February. If he’s an empty nester in his late fifties or early sixties, there’s a good chance he doesn’t even want his fifth week and it could be infringing on his ability to make extra money.

The average pilot with two weeks (or someone prorated down to less than 14 days, who then has to keep all days together) is desperate for more. They would take it in February, but would much prefer time off they could count on in the summer. They are more likely to have kids in the home and planning for time off with blocked out vacation weeks beats hoping for PBS or PCS magic in the short hairs.

A few solutions bolster both of these extremes:

1. Pay and credit ADG for all vacation days
2. Add a week of vacation to all longevities
2B. Permit this (and only this) additional week to be sold back to the company. Clearly this reduces the jobs-added for vacation improvements, but it doesn’t erode what we already have. No, every provision needn’t be a slippery slope camel nose...
3. Level the vacation week offerings more uniformly throughout the year (reportedly already accomplished in negotiations)
4. Require liquidated/sold-back vacation weeks to be returned to the pool for bidding / vacation move-up.
5. Allow incomplete weeks of vacation (prorations) to be bid separately (e.g., 13 days can be bid in one or two chunks).
6. Allow pilots on MLOA to bid for subsequent vacation years. Liquidate their award to the masses if they have not returned in time to use awarded vacation weeks and allow them to bid such liquidations for remaining available weeks.
7. Remove all options for the company to liquidate pilots’ vacation for training…continue liquidation options by mutual consent.
8. Add robust holiday pay to align holiday-relevant bidding behavior with what people actually want to do around holidays (work vs time off).