Got this little Nugget from envoy ALPA.

May Schedules
April 11, 2016

Pilots,

The Company has just finished building the May bid lines. There’s no way to candy coat it, the E145 flying in ORD does not look pretty. As Captain Ric Wilson has recently stated, we got more hours of flying from AAG recently. These hours were put into the system as Open Time in April. However, the hours were received in time to be included in the May bid packs.

The bad news is that the majority of hours came from Republic Airways in ORD. These hours are almost all early morning departures. So, ORD commutability really took a hard hit in May. The flight file from AAG was late (again!!), meaning the scheduling committee had very limited time to work with the data.

Your ALPA volunteers stepped up to the plate and did what they could. Our volunteers ran multiple line generations, and spent countless hours, emails and calls trying to improve the commutability. The best they were able to do is get to 20% both end commutable pairings for E145 flying in ORD, which is an improvement from where the May build began. Ideally, this number should be around 60%. The committee was able to keep the majority of lines with 3 days off in between sequences, plus also kept some variety of trips. A small improvement they were able to achieve: the lines containing pairings that were not commutable on both ends were built so that if you ended late on one sequence your next sequence would start late and vise-versa for as many lines as possible.

The split-duty/CDOs are going to stay at least one more month. As you have seen split-duty/CDOs can affect (drive up) productivity, but can sometimes negatively affect commutability as well. If we keep split-duty/CDOs past May each base should benefit from getting a few more city pairs and recent studies show this can bring productivity closer to 5hrs per day. When this happens there can be better variety (1 & 2 day trips). Better variety means more opportunity for early start/late finish on short sequences likely to be nabbed by local pilots, which will save the late starts and early finishes for the longer trips favored by commuters.

Split Duty/CDOs are a double-edged sword and must be managed carefully. Because they service late departures and early finishes, they can negatively impact commutability, however if they increase productivity then 1 & 2 day trips can be built soaking up the remainder of the early starts and late finishes.

We are constantly telling management that we need more midday flying, so we can get our commutability back to over 60%. Since the majority of our pilots are now reluctant commuters, this should be a very high priority. Another factor includes multiple AAG feeder airlines servicing the same city, reducing the amount of flying each does to/from that city. This reduced frequency also gives rise to poor efficiency and poor schedules. Lastly, our mix of three fleet types is also impacting our ability to create schedules. The bigger hulls are getting longer stage length flying and the smaller hulls are getting the shorter stage lengths, and this can make it difficult to mix up the flying into efficient flying for all. Absent some changes in the flying we get from AAG, the Company will continue to struggle to find efficient schedules for our smaller hulls.

The Scheduling Committee has had robust internal dialogue, with all members trying to shake the tree of ideas on how we can work within the company’s processes to make better schedules. However, much of what can be done has been done. We would, of course, like more time to work with the flight file data, and more time to massage pairing generation and line builds, however until AAG changes where and when we fly (and in which aircraft) we will likely continue seeing disappointing schedules.


Good Luck!