Pilots are limited to 1000 hours of flying a year. Period. Most airlines guarantee 70-75 hours a month, but pilots can fly up to 83 hours a month if they so desire.

Aside from the fact that this post is absolutely hilarious, $1 seems like a steal for salt on an airplane these days.

All of them...

For those of us genuinely interested in knowing, how is it anyone's business--other than that of the employee and those responsible for payroll or regulatory requirements--how many hours a person has worked and (therefore) approximately how much that person has earned? Frankly, if my employer posted how many hours I worked or how much I earned in a system viewable by others, I'd be pretty hacked off.

Granted, I understand that this puts the union in a tough position, but my response is "too bad." Whether or not a person chooses to exercise the terms of his or her contract should be up to the person in question. APA may inform these people of their rights under the contract, but it is not the responsibility of APA or anyone else to strongarm those people into taking advantage. Given the current economic situation (price of gas, bread, electricity, and so on), if I had the opportunity for OT, I'd be sucking down every hour possible.

A legitimate gripe, but one that is separate from this discussion. To me, this demonstrates a key failing in how AA works with (or doesn't, as your perspective may dictate) its unions. There's no reason that the change had to be made under the cover of darkness, nor that any other changes requested--or required--by the union (i.e. AA's EMPLOYEES) couldn't also be implemented at the same time. However, I will extend the theory that removal of a data column is vastly easier, from a programming standpoint, to remove than the addition of a feature.

Which leads us to the fun of the last few weeks of Dec. You can practically predict when those posts are going to start.

Steve B.

LOL!!!

So now you know how we AA ffs feel about how long it takes for AA to update our elite statuses and upgrade sticker balances. Burn a sticker, and its gone immediately... but earn 4 stickers, and they take a week to post.

I'm certainly not a big fan of AA's unions in general but this one actually seems like a good move.

1. Go to court asserting your right so there's not an underground activity that AA can fight about.
2. Pilots banding together to not take overtime so they can keep junior folks flying rather than laid off. I tend to think this actually works to AA's advantage since they'll have a bigger pool of available and current pilots and can be more flexible in irreg ops.
3. The downside is that AA's benefit costs will be up with more pilots on the payroll. I suspect that will be offset if senior pilots aren't working overtime and flying is going to junior pilots.

The funny thing is that if AA management had suggested this to the union, it would have been treated as a big plot.

Of course, the real problem for pax is when they need to get a pilot to fly an extra leg at 8P from DFW because the scheduled pilot is elsewhere (sick, delayed flight etc), the pilots may be turning it down.

It's not that pilot hours are anyone's business. It is just information about hours that have been posted next to pilots names on crew lists forever. The pilots weren't the ones who asked to have it removed. It was only their hours vs. having the ability to sabre stalk someone and find out where they were at any given time.

Unlike other jobs, a union job (especially an airline one) has no secrets regarding pay scales. If you want to see what pilots make at each airline there's a web site you can visit and punch the hours in/airplane and seat/and airline and you'll see it. Same holds true for FA's. If you had access to a pilot bid sheet they also list what they will make for the month at the bottom of each selection. What they make has only become an issue because management made it one by claiming they make too much for what they do so they could turn the public against them.

Pilots are trying to get money back in their contracts so they can work what they do now and not work one more trip a month in order to get that money back. If pilots continue to heed the call of more productivity they will never get a raise and they will wind up working more hours per month.

BTW, it's not strictly a desire to be lazy or mess with the company either. MOST pilots are genuinely worried about any rise in pilot maximum hours because they are worried about fatigue issues and having responsibility for the lives of their passengers on their hands. There are fatigue issues now that worry them due to constant ATC holds, storms, and significant delays.

I'm not for raising pilot maximum hours. I see what that has done to the FA work force and I wouldn't want to see that kind of fatigue in my pilot. We've had an AA bean counter and a computer decide what kind of schedules can be handled by a human and I can attest that it just isn't working for us so I definitely don't want the pilots flying me around dealing with the same scenarios.