Pinnacle upgrade less than ONE year.

[Lear70]

yep street captain and looking forward to more street captains hitting the property. Hey Lear 70 much respect from me! The base manager here is MC and his assistant is BS. Outstanding gentlemen they run the show in MSP.

That's what happens when I lose touch with my MSP contacts...

Good for you guys, glad you got some better mgmt peeps in MSP.

One or two of the admin assistants was pretty cool, and that was about it (not to mention one of them being really HOT, but I digress).

Good luck with the street CA thing. 3 years on reserve SUCKED, and I really hope you get some movement under you sooner rather than later. :beer:

 

[CherryBomb]

Forgive my ignorance, Ive never flown 121, but how bad is reserve? Do you have any sort of schedule? Do you have any idea of when you are on call and when you aren't? Do you have any days off a month?

Sorry to ask, mamma says Im "ignant"...

 

[Lear70]

Pinnacle reserve can change (and does) periodically.

Minimum days off is 10, so that's what the company gives you (don't ever expect more from the company than the absolute minimum they have to give you contractually in ANY area of the contract unless it benefits them).

14 hour on-call periods at "home" in which you are NOT on duty. Big difference, long story. 90 minute callout from "home", which means you have to be checked in at a computer terminal within 90 minutes from their first call.

9 hour airport reserve periods in which you ARE on duty, as you are sitting in operations, checked in on a computer, in uniform, expected to make it to an airplane in 15 minutes or less, although the contract doesn't specify this and if you take a little longer 'cause you're grabbing a bite to eat when they call, there's absolutely NOTHING they can do to you.

5 days on 3 days off, then 5 days on, 2 days off, in perpetuity, ad nauseum, amen.

They change the mix of reserve based on who is running the scheduling department, how lately they've gotten burned from not having an airport reserve or how lately they've gotten burned having too many airport reserves and not enough home reserves and no one was duty legal for a trip, etc.

If you are assigned more than one day of ready reserve, the first must start with a PM or Late RR, and the last day must be AM (for commutability).

The best mix was day 1 RRL, day 2-4 HR (home reserve), day 5 RRA. That's not so bad, especially if you're not flying, you can actually go catch a movie, work out, have dinner with friends, etc, ALMOST like a day off.

The worst mix was all 5 days Ready Reserve - they did this for about 6 months back in mid- 2003. I almost quit without having any backup job plans, it was brutal.

Right now if you got hired you'd be flying your butt off, they're so short of crews. I regularly credited 90-95 hours of pay on reserve most months and in 2005 timed out for the year in late November and was removed, with pay, for almost the entire month of December, crediting about 1,200 hours for the year.

 

[Dharmesh1231]

Lear70....I am assuming the monthly guarntee at Pncl is 75hrs, so when you fly beyond that, how are you paid...is it time and a half or what's the procedure there....trying to find out if Pncl's a good place to apply right now and get max flying a month.

 

[WMUSIGPI]

Forgive my ignorance, Ive never flown 121, but how bad is reserve? Do you have any sort of schedule? Do you have any idea of when you are on call and when you aren't? Do you have any days off a month?

Sorry to ask, mamma says Im "ignant"...

Reserve was much nicer at Mesaba than at the 135 company I'm at. At Mesaba there was no airport ready reserve. And you are considered on duty when you go on call with a 90 minute callout time. At the 135 I'm at you aren't on duty while on call so you can be on call for days at a time and unless they call you in you have no time off. Plus it's a 30 minute report time. Not to mention you didn't need to do the flight planning and stop for catering on the way at the airlines. If the phone rang you could finish dinner, shower, pack and still get there on time. At the 135.... drop the fork, maybe have time for an "Irish Shower" and hope traffic isn't too bad.

 

[Lazy8]

Have you folks listened to the PNCL 2006 Q4 conference call? Trenary makes a point to say that they're looking for contracts with other airlines that would expand the RJ fleet (with larger RJ aircraft). Some other good-to-know company planning/goals talked about on this call as well.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=131072&p=irol-IRHome

g

 

[CherryBomb]

Oh man I feel your pain, Part 135 is really the only type of work Ive done. I allways got the call to go to work at 11pm after a full day of washing the car, mowing the lawn etc. Yay! now I get to sit in a efen Lear for 14 hours!!!!

121 seems nice...
Pay seems like a kick in the family maker...

Reserve was much nicer at Mesaba than at the 135 company I'm at. At Mesaba there was no airport ready reserve. And you are considered on duty when you go on call with a 90 minute callout time. At the 135 I'm at you aren't on duty while on call so you can be on call for days at a time and unless they call you in you have no time off. Plus it's a 30 minute report time. Not to mention you didn't need to do the flight planning and stop for catering on the way at the airlines. If the phone rang you could finish dinner, shower, pack and still get there on time. At the 135.... drop the fork, maybe have time for an "Irish Shower" and hope traffic isn't too bad.

 

[Lear70]

Lear70....I am assuming the monthly guarntee at Pncl is 75hrs, so when you fly beyond that, how are you paid...is it time and a half or what's the procedure there....trying to find out if Pncl's a good place to apply right now and get max flying a month.

The short answer? You only get paid more if you actually fly more. Didn't used to be that way, but the Association backed down from a grievance I filed a long time ago about that where they USED to credit daily and if you flew over on any one day, you immediately got paid more than guarantee. They stopped doing that about 2 years ago.

For instance, if you fly 50 hours, you get paid 75. If you fly 80 hours, you get paid 80 hours.

In these two examples, I'm using fly and "credit" interchangeably, just for simplicity and because credit rarely exceeds block by more than an hour a month at PCL (except for CDO's).

Extension pay and Junior Assignment pay will pay over guarantee by 1.25 and 1.5 respectively, and you're SUPPOSED to be given a compensatory day off for those, but that's kind of a longer story as well (hard to get comp days when they're so short-staffed they have to JA and EXT people anyway).

Have you folks listened to the PNCL 2006 Q4 conference call? Trenary makes a point to say that they're looking for contracts with other airlines that would expand the RJ fleet (with larger RJ aircraft). Some other good-to-know company planning/goals talked about on this call as well.

He's been saying that for 3 years now.

 

[Lazy8]

He's been saying that for 3 years now.

PNCL hasn't had the opportunity to obtain flying outside of the NWA family until just recently though, correct? I imagine that was quite a limiting factor over the past few years.

g

 

[undpilot]

Airport reserve at Pinnacle is now only from 7pm to 11pm at night. No more sitting at the airport all day. All of the lines with airport reserve have it on the first 2-3 days, PM reserve in the middle, and AM reserve on the last day (5:30pm release).