Sorry to burst the pessimistic myth-bubbles here, but the company is not short pilots nor has the company been relying on increased SRM to maintain schedule integrity. Also, I just got back from Denver and had lunch with one of the individuals in charge of implementing the FOX system. The system has not yet been "turned on" and is still being "manually" loaded every month with a schedule produced by human managers because the first part of FOX they actually turned on was the CQ grading using iPads and that failed so the folks in charge are delaying implementation of FOX until they are sure it is working 100%.


In addition, the Schedule Committee publishes a detailed monthly report with all the stats needed to determine the reality of the myths being proposed here. Notice the company maintains close to a 1000 pilot surplus above what they consider to be "min" staffing, and what's more if you look at other items in the reports you will find that SRM has gone down in just as many BES and months as it has gone up and regardless SRM continues to be a tiny percentage of total hours flown.