Originally Posted by
Check Essential
That was the subject of a pretty long discussion.
Right now we basically have no rules. Crew tracking can take any broken trip that comes up and run it as a reroute or send it over to crew scheduling as a "Will need pilot to cover" and then skeds put it through the trip coverage ladder.
Under this new rule any leg that comes open for any reason and is scheduled to push back in greater than 14 hours will have to go through the Section 23 coverage ladder.
This is theoretically going to reduce the number of reroutes substantially.
Scrappy expressed significant confidence the MEC will be able to monitor that process for compliance. New programming will be put in place.
Some of this stuff got pretty complex though and I may not be exactly correct. The reps were asking a lot of tough questions about this section and they really seemed to be well versed.
Thanks for the update.
Regarding the >14 for a leg though, are we 100% sure this applies to all legs? What if a leg departs ATL 11:00 from now, but the return leg departs STL 14:01 from now. How do we cover that return leg when there isn't a pilot there to originate? If a DH is built, suddenly that's less than 14 hours as well. Hmmm.
What about any return flight from an out station? Are we sure the outblund flight that's part of a reroute will become a WS/GS coverage trip on the way back? If so, how does the rerouted pilot get back? I have a hard time believing the company will DH a crew to get them while they DH back especially after what would have been legal rest. What about hub-to-non-hub-to-other-non-hub legs? It really seems like there will be legs that are known outside of 14 hours that never go through the coverage process.
If they are talking about originators from a hub, I wouldn't expect much attempt for pushing the limits and perhaps good software could monitor things. But I don't see strict adherence for non hub return flights. My guess is the company won't ever put that up for WS/GS and will always use the originally rerouted pilots and if we grieve it they will claim that was the intent all along and it would be unreasonable to expect every single >14 leg to go out to the slip system especially when that would generate additional double crew DH credits.