Anyone know how often they recruit experienced crew or when they're likely to re-open recruitment? Not BACF, mainline.

Cheers!

You're welcome, not sure how much use the advice really was but as Rex B has said rostering under JSS seems to be a major stressor for many at the moment, most especially for many at the bottom.

Whats the situation with the BA BALPA pilots that hit the news with the racism email stuff?

While acknowledging that JSS is FAR from perfect this isn't entirely accurate. I'm 60% ish on the 787 and I have been getting weekends off no problem. And going to the places I want to go to. I've been in 8 years so I guess your 10 to 50% is about right though.

That said, the bottom of some fleets (certainly 777/320) looks pretty unpleasant. What remains to be seen is what, if any, effect the tripling of weekend points has on the availability of weekends off. Personally, I will definitely try to work at least a couple of weekends a month because I absolutely don't want to do more reserve.

i personally think seniority works for some things, but not others. For instance, I think the points system we utilise for leave works very fairly. If you bid for unpopular leave periods you build up enough points such that you can bid for popular leave periods and expect to get them.

Similarly, I think seniority coupled with the freeze periods after a successful move, works well with PRIAM bidding for fleet and status.

I am not sure how well seniority works for bidding for monthly work though. A bidding system should exist, whereby pilots get some say over when they want to work and the kind of work they’d prefer, but the level of difference that being senior or junior makes is currently ridiculous with JSS. Bidline at least created lines of work in a generally fair work distribution, and you had to pick one that had what you wanted, but more often than not had something you weren’t so keen on in order to get it. That meant the senior pilot could be happy they got the line they wanted, whilst the junior guy wasn’t being well and truly shafted. Now it is very much the case that the senior pilots pick just what they want and the junior guys end up getting shafted. Generally people want to work as little as possible, so the senior guys achieve that, whilst the junior guys have as many trips as possible squeezed onto their lines. Then they get global constraints and crew repair to mess with their bid so that they can have even more work squeezed in. Couple that with the fact the junior guys are paid less, and it really isn’t a fair system at all.

A points system for working weekends needs to be points for avoiding working weekends, not for avoiding reserve. The amount of reserve the junior guys have to do is already way more than what the senior guys have to do. It won’t deter the senior guys from avoiding weekend work. Similarly with trips, there should be a requirement for the system to get everyone as close as possible to the average credit per trip over the year. Junior long haul pilots doing 50% more reports than senior pilots is wrong.

Probably a very ignorant question but how hard can it be to put to vote the following concept?

Seniority rules for only 50% worth of weekend work. The other 50% is random.

Agreed, and I'm afraid I'm going to be controversial GS-Alpha because I certainly do remember working every weekend outside of leave for well over 6 months, maybe a year, as a junior Long Haul P1- Bidine, Blindline holder. The only solution I could find was to transition to the Aspirational part time contract....FWIW I still work most weekends in a Full Time Month and of course clobber a weekend during a Part Time Month...IMHO that goes with the territory to some extent but there were some very naive expectations being expressed in the run up to the introduction in JSS, such as " I won't have to work weekends anymore" from someone who had been in the company just over a year..

That said I'm not of the opiion it is fair to inflict perpetual weekend working on the junior, I really am not..

As for the new weekend points system...I think it was set up to make it appear at least something was being done by offering some sort of incentive.... but the link to Reserve Vulnerability rather than weekend work vulnerability was done because (IMHO) the company will be very reluctant to add another clashing/blocking tool by allowing points to be swapped for weekends off.. Given how much BA hates people being able to clash/block work ( part of the reason Bidline went)I was pleasantly surprised that BALPA managed to negotiate the Golden Days....

I thought we were starting on occasions to see to six trips a month on some lines in relatively recent "days of old" under Bidline and Roster assign/FA but I'm probably wrong.

Obviously you need some way of quantifying work done, but doing it by perhaps simply by looking at number of reports ex-base would open up a whole new can of worms.; on the T7 for example if you go down that road the senior might opt for, say, 5 or 6 TLV 2 day trips, per month, leaving them lots of days off, whilst OTOH the junior would struggle to fill their lines with the longer trips...and how for example do you propose to quantify the single report at base 9 day SIN/SYD/SIN which is on the T7? That can be a real nasty in terms of fatigue and funnily enough often doesn't go massively senior in the bidding, either under Bidline or JSS...

I'd agree "something must be done" to alleviate the problems some are facing but I'm not sure what the solution is, perhaps seeding junior rosters with a "heavy trip"? That of course would takes us back to something that was done in those "days of old...." and back to a fairness element of a system that many people seemed to be very unhappy with and voted to get rid of.

I suspect ultimately the solution lies in addressing the amount of "output" the company thinks is reasonable, there is only so much that can be gained by tinkering with JSS.