Another ray of sunshine from our Union on the state of our schedules.
We wish we had better news, but it looks like August is going to be another tough month. Envoy has stopped taking additional flying because of our current staffing situation. The airline simply cannot retain or hire a large enough quantity of pilots. In our discussions with Company officials, the current outlook is for this staffing crunch to continue through the end of 2016.
The flight file we got for August is bad, to say the least. We have 98% staged overnights. So the midday turns are being flown by the crews that are going into or coming out of an overnight. This leaves very few midday turns left over to build anything other than four day trips. This is especially hurtful to pilots with overnights that leave the outstation very late in the day. Below is an explanation of what solutions have been run in an effort to improve this.
August’s flight file allows for 4 different possibilities when running solutions:
1. Limiting the number of 2/3 days
2. Restricting 4 days and asking for 2 and 3 days
3. No restriction on pairing length
4. No CDOs
Of the 4 possibilities, the best option is #3. It gave us the highest block per day, highest pairing average, and the least number of lines with the highest line value. This solution is largely 4 day trips (mainly in DFW), but should allow for most lines to have 3 days off in between sequences. Option number 3 allows for a higher line average which should result in more days off than the other options.
The Scheduling Committee is simply unable to improve upon the Company’s results due to the incredibly poor flight schedule provided to Envoy by AAG.
There is some good news, as at the very least we were able to get commutability up a little higher than in July.
Jeff Cortez
Envoy Scheduling Committee Chairman