Scab

Anyone who crosses a picket line or who picks up open flying with pilots on furlough.

“I saw that open HNL trip so I scabbed it before they could assign it to a reserve.”

“I noticed you were on the senior man list, were you able to scab any trips?”

“I’m on VDO this week hoping to scab a trip for 50% add pay”

herpes pilot

A term for a pilot who after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 60 would not retire, but instead would move into the Flight Engineer seat, which does not have a mandatory retirement age.

1) My Second Officer was a herpes pilot. Those guys just wont go away.

2) The herpes pilot I'm flying with said he can't retire because he's got 3 ex-wives to pay off.

Chief Pilot’s Office

The Office in which the Chief Pilot sits. Except its not just his office, but all of flight operations is now called the CPO.

Example:

“Hey I’m looking for the Chief Pilot’s Office.”
“His office is in Flight Operations. What do you need to see him for? Are you in trouble?”
“No we just need to go to Flt Ops.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

jumpseat

The extra seat(s) in the cockpit that airline pilots have access to commuting to work

1) I had to use the jumpseat to get to work today because the flight was full

2) I can't believe that scab wanted access to my jumpseat. I told him to go fuck himself.

3) If you want to ride in my jumpseat you better be wearing your fucking ALPA pin.

7👍 2👎

guppy

A nickname for any aircraft in the Boeing 737 family of airplanes

I can't believe I have to ride in the back of a Guppy all the way to Hawaii.

7👍 8👎

Rhapsody Blue

When you want employees to wear a purple uniform, but you want them to think its going to be blue.

The employees have rejected purple as a uniform choice, so we’ll just keep the same purple but call it Rhapsody Blue and hope nobody notices it.

Pilot Furlough

When airline management has thrown away Billions in cash on failed stock buyback schemes, a threatened pilot furlough is used to try and extract pilot concessions, so management has more money in the future for more risky stock buybacks that only benefit them.

Example #1: "Well, we pissed away all that money the employees made on stock buybacks, so we will threaten a massive pilot furlough and ram some pay and work rule cuts down their throats. Are we still on for our tee time later today?"

Example #2: "If the pilot furlough doesn't give us enough money to do more stock buybacks, we will just displace everyone to the lowest paying positions and try to force more wage and work rule concessions on them. Make sure there are plenty of hookers and blow for the airline manager party tonight. Shit is about to get real when we announce those pilot furloughs."