Originally Posted by ZapBrannigan

There’s a podcast called Pro Pilot Playbook. In their August 29th episode, in a segment regarding hiring, they said that they don’t consider Southwest to be on par with a legacy airline career. They went on to say that nobody at Southwest can make the money that legacy airline counterparts earn. Now, forget for a moment the difference in work required, this is demonstrably false.
But this is the perception in the industry right now and it’s getting out to job seekers through the channels that young job seekers use to research employment.

Thats a problem for me and you because when the dust settles and the contract is signed we want the best and brightest, most experienced and highly qualified pilots that SWA can possibly recruit sitting next to us. We don’t want the left overs or those with skeletons in their closet that can’t go anywhere else.

I don’t pretend to know where Pro Pilot Playbook gets their information, but I think that while there is value in highlighting the areas where our CBA lags our peers at other airlines (both legacy and otherwise), we don’t need to make stuff up to add sprinkles on top. Bottom line, this place isn’t as bad as we’re making it out to be and I fear we are only hurting ourselves by selling it like this. I’m not saying we should try to polish a turd, but rather just be honest - both the good and the bad - and give the applicants the full picture with which to make their decisions.

Apparently every clown with a microphone is doing enough to scare good pilots away from us without self sabotage on our part.

Originally Posted by Poppapimp

Pardon my ignorance but what’s the deal on pay when not allowed to pre board? Does it apply when you have 20 min to get off of your inbound flight and walk a half mile to your fully boarded DH and get crammed into the last middle seat?
Guess I ought to pay closer attention to the RBFs before deleting….nah…who am I kidding with that, but I would appreciate the info nonetheless.

Originally Posted by Puckpilot78

That's not the "intent" of the pre board pay, but I don't know that anyone has tried to claim it when they were scheduled with too little time to be able to. It came about because too many ops agents were not letting crews pre board for whatever reason. Honestly most ops agents are good people it's the small minority that ruin it.

Originally Posted by Grumpyaviator

When we go paperless a lot of ops agents and CSRs will be obsolete. The only thing they’ll have to do is board and deplane.

Originally Posted by CA1900

All this, when we have two internet-connected tablets in every cockpit. It absolutely blows my mind that it's taking this long to go paperless.

Originally Posted by flensr

Your EFB is connected to the internet? How, unless you're paying for the wifi? When it works that is...

Cellular at the gate isn't good enough, and document handling on an EFB when wifi isn't working can be problematic especially when we must have a reliable way to maintain version control so everyone is using the same version of the document or dataset.

Originally Posted by flensr

Your EFB is connected to the internet? How, unless you're paying for the wifi? When it works that is...

Originally Posted by CA1900

You don't need to pay for the Wifi for the whitelisted stuff. The electronic releases (currently through Crewhub) are already whitelisted, and I have no doubt the rest of the electronic fight release modules will be as well when the time comes.



With very few exceptions, cellular works perfectly at the gate. There are a few gates that seem to be in AT&T dead zones, but they're rare. The odds of being in a cellular dead zone and have broken Wifi at the same time are very low.

A printed flight release can be the backup, but we're long past the point where it should be the primary. (And the weather packet should have gone electronic two iPads ago.)

Originally Posted by CA1900

A printed flight release can be the backup, but we're long past the point where it should be the primary. (And the weather packet should have gone electronic two iPads ago.)