Originally Posted by
SONORA PASS
Flyby,
You have had some of the best posts on APC, please keep it that way.
If our company is so incredibly screwed up on training scheduling that they are down to the wire by one or two days of contractual limits, how can we say it is the pilot that is being unethical? He is just exercising his seniority and contract. The company does not bend the contract for a few hundred dollars of extra pilot pay even when it cost them over a million (saw this first hand), why should we?
That same pilot likely watched the company shift the DEN flying he once did, back to the 737 he once flew, while not being able to bid on any of those slots. He would likely tell us that was unethical.
None of our pilots should ever fear discipline or termination for a fatigue or sick call…
Once again I have deeply appreciate your contributions here, and would likely have blown right by all of this if it had come from anyone else. Your sir have been a class act, and I hope you stay that way.
This whole ISL issue will work itself out in time, and that DEN pilot just helped the process out by moving the re-balancing process along.
We our in this together.
All the best,
SP
Senora,
Thanks so much for the kind words and compliment. You are also a thoughtful and solid poster. If we bump in to each other first beer is on me! Also, I agree with everything you posted above. Never do anything fatigued. Usually it will harm you or potentially could harm you.
I had started to explain in another post but deleted it because I felt that I was divulging too much information and the identify of the pilot could be jeopardized, which I didn't want.
The person in question used two fatigue calls. On the outside it seems like two days of training where made. The short is that the person called in fatigue the next to last day of his sims and was rolling into several days off (poor scheduling and not his fault). However, he called in fatigued the next to last day and said he couldn't do the next day either. Scratch two events, go into 6 days off and the ripple effect was greater than is seems. This was when scheduling was identifying those who were well behind and who was going home for a month to "catch up." He second fatigue call was the last two days of sims. The kicker was that we was working out in the gym when he made the sick call. There were witnesses (even another instructor in the gym) to this while he did it and then continued his workout. He was hoping to get the 30 days or more off to push him to exceed the 90 days.
Scheduling identified those who needed to continue and he was one of them. They repaired his schedule and his extra three weeks of strategic time off and had him completing within the acceptable time. It is alleged he was very angry at this and then told many (instructors too) that he was going to call in sick for his next block of days. Fortunately, he was persuaded by partner and others to not do this since he had been so vocal to too many people that it would not have been a good idea.
That's the jest of it. Very extreme case and it shocked a lot. I believe that this is an outlier and not the norm at all and it doesn't matter if it was north or south. It was just wrong in my opinion.
I hope this explains some of my comments?