Gunfighter

That bolded statement sounds similar to "don't worry, one day you'll be senior too" when pulling up the ladder. Are you saying as WB A your biggest problem is sitting lopsided on top of your thick wallet? I can assure you, there are plenty of pilots below your elevated station of WB A that are even less worried about a few $$ of soft pay. They still track it down, not because they need it, but because it's what is due. Not chasing what is owed you is doing a disservice to the group by encouraging wage theft.

hockeypilot44

I had a captain call me petty for filling out an expense report for $10 for a missed crew meal.

I obviously didn’t need the $10. It was a principle thing. He didn’t bother.

notEnuf

X3 so far, 2 paid and 1 denied
it ain't about the $

Gunfighter

Exactly. In an airline that runs on metrics, we should give them something to measure for every penny we are shorted. At some point the administrative burden will exceed the cost savings of apathetic pilots.

Iceberg

While I appreciate your concern, I’ve done bankruptcy already. I’m aware how it works.

We’ll see over the long run what happens with trip construction, but I’ve seen less long sits since they started costing money a few months ago.

Iceberg

Maybe your name calling and misinformation that when called on you just ignore and move on to complain how you were wronged in a different way? No, that couldn’t be it.

Crown

the question is with the next 350 order, do we go ULR?

Gone Flying

unfortunately the ULR really isn't a fix to our problems. The reason the 777-200LR worked so well is because it took the bigger engines and stronger structure of the -300ER and fit it to the smaller -200. This gave it an increased MTOW and thus longer range for the same payload.

the A350-900ULR does not do this. It still has the same (or similar) MTOW to the regular -900. It just has an extra fuel tank where the forward cargo bin is, but the extra gas is only useful if we significantly decrease the payload. This is why Singapore only has 160 ish seats on their ULR vs our 306.

what we would need is an a350-900 with structural enhancements that give it the increased MTOW of the -1000

First Break

Soft pay is a penalty for building trips with undesirable features. The optimizer now has to decide if it wants to spend the money on such features, or if it is more efficient to add staffing.

Ive already seen a noticeable improvement in trip quality in September since everything was implemented. Layovers over 12-14 hours have been the exception in the last several years, and now I’m seeing longer layovers are much more common like I remember them a decade ago. Same for extreme duty periods. Yes, EDP pay is nice when working a long day, but anecdotally I’ve also seen less of them in September than in recent memory.

As for the 350, we do have a full delivery schedule for the next 2+ years that will max our training capacity. Any order realistically can’t even be absorbed into our training pipeline until well into 2026.

Another data point - Emirates order, just announced this week, has deliveries start in August of 2024.

Deliveries at Delta in 2026 seems perfectly realistic if we announce this fall.

Valar Morghulis

What I see is they don't get to participate in the schadenfreude that their predecessor's did. Their whole career they were told "one day, you'll be senior" while suffering in the NB while all the bling was poured into relatively few WB spots. Then one day they got there, and yes, they get the WB pay, but a lot of cool new pay toys went to the NB and not just only to the WB as their seniors did to them. "What? I was supposed to get all the attention!!"...it's a variation on the "I suffered, so should you" which was a pretty popular talking point by some of JB's friends during the UNA debate. When they say "you'll never understand what was given up", what they really mean is "you'll never understand what fun it was to sit on a high perch, cashing in on all the good deals, while warbling about how great the WB is and tsk tsking how bad you have it on the NB".

Some people are really tied up in the "I'm a pilot" mindset. Not just that, but the whole hierarchical rank thing that in their head places some above everyone else. Part of their "fun" is pointing out how good they have it while how "bad" their juniors have it.