Originally Posted by
iFlyRC
Money is one thing, reserve work rules is another. Pretty sure crew tracking does a better job driving away people than the pay.
Yeah--for example, they could set buffers algorithmically--i.e., based on historical absences & reserve utilization for specific days/weeks/months--rather than arbitrarily raising them to "slightly above whatever we think we'll have available."
In this day and age of open-source/free/easy-to-use predictive modelling software/APIs (Google Predict comes to mind), I find it absolutely insane (from both a company and pilot QOL perspective) that Crew Line is still arbitrarily picking ONE buffer number for every day of the entire month. We all know that holidays, weekends, Super Bowl Sunday, etc. etc. generate more sick calls & absences. We all know that certain months will generate more hub IROPs than others--these are historical facts that an algorithm can account for much more accurately and quickly than a human--and FOR FREE given the current ecosystem of free APIs/software packages.
Also, as an example of how insane our arbitrary buffers are--if an IROP does hit your base, commuters are going to miss segments of their 3/4-day trips. Those segments are going to drop into open time and reduce net reserves, and some reserves are going to miss their reserve periods. An automated reserve-buffer setting system would automatically account for the IROP, sync with Flica, and raise reserve buffers for the next 3-4 days in realtime. THAT would make infinite sense. The way we do it now is a lazy, barbaric "welp looks like we got 14 people on average on reserve next month--set the buffer to 17 for every single day all month long and we'll hope it works out."
Lastly (re: work rules/Crew Line & Tracking practices) I'm just a line pilot, but based on some previous experience in tech/Computer Science in the past few years, I find it absolutely insane that human beings are still manually processing trip trade/drop requests based on easily-programmable 117 paramaters and what (should) be an easily-programmable buffer-setting function. It literally makes me laugh out loud...it's like if a company started a call-center where employees had to call in/submit a request to a human being to calculate things like 2+4 or 5+7. It is literally that absurd.