First, I'm not in a squad, but am a 3 year AH veteran and feel your pain. Here's what us Silicon Valley types came up with. Forward this to AH if you like.
It's not that difficult to code. I used to fly Falcon 3.0 at my old office on the company network. We had some of the delvelopers write code that only allowed you on as a "single" for 15 minutes. We had formed squads based on department, Sales, marketing, development, IT etc. A couple guys would try to crash our dogfights/missions. So development changed our login procedures and set up ID that required a Squad ID. Anyone could log on, but if your ID was not associated to an existing Squad, your session would time out after 15 minutes.
So as long as you and your across the country squad mate log on within the allotted time period, you're safe. Otherwise you have to wait for one of your buddies to show up. If they're on already when you log in, then you're golden.
If they choose to, AH can set up a Squad only arena that requires a minimum of 2 squadmates to be on at the same time. (Numbers on this server would be half of the current numbers in MA.) As the squad leaves and you're the last on one in your squad, you'll be timed out in 15 min and you go back to MA if you want. The fix to this is to set up a "Misc" squad for all the "singles" that are left. If your squad bails for the day but want to stay on, you log into the Misc. Squad for the remainder of your play time. There has to be 2 players in the Misc Squad and same time out rules apply. Pretty simple.
It worked for us in the Silicon Valley.
