Trip Rig = 3.5:1 which basically means for every 3.5 Time Away From Base (TAFB) on your rotation you will receive 1 hour of credit. This is pretty lame and definitely needs to be improved.

Duty Period Average (DPA) is 5:15 per Duty period. This is totally unacceptable and a major detriment to quality of life for DAL Pilots.

First off its Duty period vice daily average which means you can have only 3 duty periods even on a 4 day trip. *** This is done via layovers greater than 24 hours so that if you are a 4 day trip, fly on every one of those 4 days but have a long layover you may only qualify for 3 duty periods. Theoretically you can have 2 duty periods on a 4 day trip but then you will be protected by the abysmal 3.5:1 trip rig. Trip rig credit is very inefficient for the pilots and not how you want to make money.

Secondly, 5:15 in itself is pretty poor. So we have a crappy system (DPA) governed by a low average. Many guys on APC have said what they would like to see instead. For example, a 6 hour daily average which would basically mean 6 hours minimum for a one day, 12 hours for a two day, 18 hours for a three day etc. The beauty of this is that if the company could produce more efficient trips the cost increase to the company is not linear. This means going from 5:15 to 6:00 approximately a 13% increase can cost the company a lot less than 13%.

The problem DAL currently has with scheduling efficiency is that marketing drives the flight schedule with little or no thought to pilot efficiency. Throw in multiple aircraft serving each city along with DCI service and the trip construction problem starts getting similar to playing three dimensional chess - very complicated. I am not syaing the company cannot do it better - its not like we have a bunch of monks locked away in a monastery cranking out the rotations (although they might do a better job) but it is all run by a computer. The computer inputs and variables are what determines our fate.

Throw in other restrictions like the companies minimum 12 hour reset after red-eyes (unilaterally imposed by the company) and you you are stuck with guys sitting on their arse for 30 hours.

Got to go - I will let someone else explain Duty Rig.

*** If you really want to directly see the negative affects of the DPA system on QOL pull up the LAX 737 bid package sometime and look over the 4900 series of rotations. This will convey the importance of good rigs far far better than reading about it on a forum and bring it home in a way we can all understand.

Hope this helps - Scoop