acl65pilot

If you want to get down to the minutia, complain to your senators, and congressman on the state level. They can fix a lot of it by getting rid of laws that charge property tax on spare parts. Its not cheap to hold a ton of parts in stores. Every airline pays property taxes on those parts. Have these laws nixed so it is less cost prohibitive to hold many of these parts.

Also, who is to say that the one spare start valve or whatever was inop was not used on another jet in the last day. Parts break, its what happens when you have a million moving parts flying in close formation.

forgot to bid

Could always take a boat.



But they do have a tendency to fail too.

Herkflyr

There is something wrong with it--it is called, as you correctly called it, "featherbedding" and here is the rub--it doesn't create jobs, just the illusion of them.

Let me ask you something. Should we, in the interest of "jobs" get rid of ATMs? Just think of all those poor bank tellers no longer smacking gum at the bank counter who no longer are issuing us $50 as we stand in line for 15 minutes and then write a check to "cash." Should we mandate that Boeing and Airbus make all planes with a flight engineer, navigator, and radio operator position? That would be great for pilot staffing. Should we get rid of cell phones, and even push button or rotary dial landline phones, so as to "create" lots of jobs of phone bank secretaries pulling and plugging hundreds of electrical wires so as to connect you to the party line? At some point opposing productivity increases--especially when they are voluntary, such as how SWA has been doing for eons--is as futile as Caligula throwing spears to oppose the tide.


I was and am opposed to "trip parking" because it did violate the intent of the white slip pickup limit in the contract. Whether I "philosophically" agree or disagree with the contract doesn't matter. The contract states such and such, and trip parking violated that intent. But...the processed worked. Enough guys got upset about it, made inputs to their LEC reps, who then directed the negotiators to do something about it. And they did.

It was inevitable. Whether it turns out to be good or not also remains to be seen.

Perhaps. But hasn't that been SWAPA's model for nearly 40 years? The same SWAPA that has long embraced a model of hard-working pilots who through their willingness and ability to fly a lot--and specifically reject the "featherbedding" model--have helped create a very stable prosperous company that has enabled the W2s that the rest of the industry has been envious of?

Most importantly, SWA pilots have embraced the "work hard, play hard" ethic while still having a great contract with ironclad pay guarantees and protections in place. Working hard and being part of an efficiently run operation does not mean that you fly to FARs while making a pitiful wage--it means that if you voluntarily want to be more productive, which just coincidentally happens to help the company be more efficient and profitable as well, you should be able to, while never being mandated to be. The problem with pilot groups in the past is you couldn't even do that.

scambo1

I get cold called all the time by guys wanting to park a trip on my line.

The Capt's almost all do it. If a guy has a hole on his schedule, it's just a matter of calling him and seeing if you can be his "friend."

scambo1

What is the the complaint hotline?

IDK why we don't have 777 efis displays in DTW (a 777 base), but I went with an mco'ed bad display awhile back.

Man, I wish we lived in a perfect world.

scambo1

No it doesn't. It's all swap with friends except for the trips picked up.

Jesse

FTB, I'm going to have to put your name in for that Chairman award thing when the nominations period comes around.

Sink r8

Sort of. You can substitute "pilot group" everywhere you wrote "union", or "ALPA", to make your post even more correct.

In other words, I don't disagree that the union is complicit in making us more (and more, and more) productive. I just don't think they're doing it over the pilot group's wishes.

Everyone always likes to imagine the survey results, and describe how the group feels, but everytime you ask anyone that's actually seen survey results, and is willing to give you some very indirect feedback, you get the impression that we (the public, collective "we" that we see in crew lounges and on APC) would probably barf in our mouths if we were faced with what we (the aggregate effect of all the individuals making up the private "we" through private, hidden surveys and ballots) actually ask of the union.

Of course, I can't quote anyone over this kind of statement, and I can't verify anything I'm saying above, since it's all anectdotal bits and pieces you gleen here and there. And maybe there is a conspiracy going on, and the reps one might get to know over the years are a bunch of lying scumbags, that like to pin their weakness on falsified, made-up information.

Or, maybe, when you look around, you realize it's all true. Look at how open time gets snapped up. Pull up someone's schedule because you found their headset, or whatever, and, low and behold, they're right near FAR's (including some reps, I'll agree). Look at trip coverage. Look at the names that pop up over and over. Look at the way guys get dreamy-eyed when they talk about 1.5X>80, and you see them lose track of the conversation and drift to a cozy, warm place far, far away. Or listen for code words, involving "huge mortgages", "kids in college", because you know the sentence is going to end with some sort of of argument to legalize and otherwise justify pilot prostitution.

Here is the bottom line for me, and I wish it were true for all: we shouldn't have any kind of private swap system. We should remove the absurd Reserves Required restrictions that caused people to run away from SWP, and we should have a 21-st century SINGLE MARKET for PCS, where seniority and transparency rule every transaction, and a SWP is not assigned a lower priority than a drop/WS, but handled as a simultaneous conditional drop and pick-up withn the same priority. IT WOULD ALL FIT WITHIN MAX PICK-UP, with a bow-wave, and we could all fill up throughout the year, to a reasonable amount that would be more in line to the pilot profession than the oldest profession. I believe this to be so important that I am using caps, boldface, all at once. And let me add, for effect, some exclamation points!!!!! I really mean it!

But, when you consider how many people here just want to turn the maximum number of tricks of possible to get the most crack possible, you realize it's not going to happen. And the union is simply representing us ho's, and defending our right to be ho's.

Lord help me, I sure hope I don't come across as cynical and jaded, but that's my analysis of the forces at play. I think it's just too convenient (and futile) to pretend this is a case of representation gone wild, instead of pilots gone wild. Until we acknowledge that we are the root cause, and people actually change their preference, and the ho's become a minority, we're stuck where we are.

Check Essential

Herk-
Good post.
The problem I have with this last contract is that we gave work rule concessions that do nothing but make us work more hours. We eliminated all the true featherbedding long ago. We're not opposing technology or asking for engineers back. Nothing like that. Now we're just working closer and closer to the FAR limits.

Whatever happened to the old "More money, more time off"?
Seems like the "more time off" part of that equation has been ditched.

Dirtdiver

Here,here! +1

We are our own worst enemies