Originally Posted by
Jack Bauer
Check your email. DALPA put out another memo on this. Pretty lame the position the company is taking before a resolution is met.
"The company’s recent All Pilots Bulletin on this subject sets out a method for acknowledging a reserve assignment that allows a pilot to both acknowledge the assignment and to comply with the new rest requirements of the FAR. Pilots may choose to acknowledge in this manner (i.e., more than 10 hours before the reserve assignment) consistent with the current PWA language. Additionally, as stated in their bulletin, the company has committed to do everything possible to assign flying at least 16 hours prior to report.
Pilots acknowledging in more than three but less than 10 hours are also, in our view, in compliance with current PWA Section 23 S. 6. b.1). The company, however, has a different view and has stated that in this circumstance, they may remove the pilot from the trip, not pay the pilot for the reserve day (place a PD on the pilot’s schedule) and require him/her to discuss the situation with their chief pilot."
Why do I have a feeling the company will end up winning yet again? That said, they do need the money...why make $3,000,000,000 when you can make say $5,000,000,000 and so on. Keep the pilot staffing suffucatingly lean and someone gets a bonus...just not the pilots. Btw, has anybody recently had trouble dropping a trip because of chronically below min staffing numbers put out by the company? How is that working for QOL?
So far, much of the focus has been on long call assignments - I was just pointing out that a similar conflict exists for conversion to short call as well. If a pilot elects to use the PWA minimum acknowledgement for assignment to short call, he would never be able to actually sit short call. Or, at the very least, his short call start time would be pushed back a minimum of 9 hours.
A pilot could use this to fine tune their SC periods. Let's say that they assign you a 0400 SC period, and you would rather have a 1000 SC call. Well, just call scheduling at 2400 (well outside the 1 hour PWA minimum) to acknowledge the SC assignment and be sure to remind them that you won't be legal to actually start your short call for at least 10 hours.
I'm happy to see ALPA taking a hard stand on this. The problem is, even if ALPA fights through the whole grievance process on this, there is no guarantee they would win. Though the 117 conflicts don't actually make our contract illegal, they do make it unworkable. There must be some legal precedence already established in case law. I just wonder whom it would favor, the company, or the pilots?