The condensed version: The Dallas PBS runs for March have had their windows adjusted after the fact to a new window of 73 to 99 down from 76 to 99.

Now, the more lengthy reasoning. As all of you in the American system are aware, the productivity levels of the flying being assigned by American are less than ideal. The pairings we are able to produce consistently average out to around 4 1/2 hours per day. This results in an average 4-day pairing credit of somewhere around 17 hours. Compounding the issue, most of the flying out of DFW is 4-day pairings (approximately 80%).

This leads to a math problem any time we are operating with a 30-day month. Contractually, you cannot have less than 11 days off. If you follow through on the math, this means 4-day trips divided into 19 days of work only allows for 4 of those trips to be legally assigned out. Obviously, there are exceptions that assist line building in the form of carry-in/carry-out pairings, vacations, AQP, etc. These exceptions fall more into the minority than the majority. As such, a large portion of the base will have a very hard time reaching the 76-hour target in a 30-day month.

We have been lucky. The last few months have had either 31-day months or reduced schedule flying allowing for most of these issues to offset themselves. Unfortunately, we were not so lucky in March. Initial attempts at runs resulted in upwards of 1600 hours of flying unable to be assigned and close to 60 pilots being put on reserve as a result. In the past, turning on unstacking would help fix this problem with a reasonable trade-off. For March, turning unstacking on resulted in the bottom 1/3 of the base having their entire schedule awarded via unstacking and a huge increase in SLG affected pilots.

...

With the help of the MEC Officers and the Senior Director of Planning and Manpower we came to an agreement to produce runs based off a 73-hour minimum window. This allowed DFW to award out properly instead of unstacking a large portion of the pilots in base and leaving a huge amount of flying uncovered. Our agreement also covered that any pilot receiving a line less than 75.83 hours would be paid for 75.83 hours.