Adlerdriver

Blob has a very good point. You two 117 proponents (FXLAX & Noworkallplay) would have more success presenting your points without the lecture to the rest of us. It would also probably work out better for you if you avoided characterizing the opinions with which you disagree as coming from ignorance while assuming your career experience in the industry has uniquely equipped you both to save us all from ourselves.

I didn’t come to FedEx straight out of the military. I spent over 4 years at a major legacy pax airline and 2 more at an ACMI airline after I got furloughed. I’ve worked under truly outstanding CBAs developed using decades of industry experience that put many aspects of our current FedEx contract to shame. I’ve seen that same CBA decimated by bankruptcy and then worked under another with duty limits that simply stated “See FARs”. I see plenty of room for improvement in our current operation at FedEx and will never be a blind apologist as you seem to want to make us out to be.

Our reserve system sucks.

Our deadhead fare system has huge loopholes that should have been addressed properly in exchange for the lay-flat bed concessions our negotiators felt necessary to give the company.

The company should find and book the correct class of service on DHs – period – not shrug and be able to say “sorry – higher class of service was sold out”.

We should have holiday pay.

We should be pay protected for trip removal and get rid of SUB.

That’s just to name a few.

To make my stance clear – I’m not against 117 or any potential safety improvements its implementation might offer our pilot group. I’m not arguing that the science used to develop it is invalid. However, expecting 117 to work in every aspect of our operations ignores the fact that we have a unique system that is different from the primary beneficiaries of 117 – i.e. the pax pilots. In spite of all that, it’s already been clearly established that much of our current CBA is already 117 compliant. So, we have small, targeted sections of our CBA and/or our system form that would be affected by implementing 117. I’m nowhere near convinced that those small changes are worth the overall result. I’ve held this opinion for years – long before DD decided to put his concerns about 117 out on the APC front page. Just because management wants the status quo because they can see 117 is going to cost them money, doesn’t mean my reservations have any connection to theirs. I am very, very wary of unintended consequences which have always been a problem at FedEx. Some of those consequences can be determined just by reading 117. 2 hours behind a door on an AM hub-turn. 9-hours of flight deck duty as a two-pilot, un-augmented crew if the flight departs in a certain window. The unintended consequences are much more difficult to determine because we don’t know how the company is going to change our pairings, schedule, etc. in order to comply. Neither one of you have the ability to determine that and whatever happened at your past airlines is irrelevant. So, all I’m asking for is some critical analysis of the situation to make sure it’s truly going to be an improvement in safety and not just making one small problem area better while making several others worse. I don’t need the government to “empower” me so I can avoid having to make a fatigue call. You’re either fit for duty or you’re not. That’s going to be our responsibility to decide regardless of what regulation we work under.

That implication that you both are more qualified to evaluate the benefits of 117 at FedEx because you worked under it somewhere else is a pretty big stretch. Some aspects of our operation are the same or close enough to the pax carriers but much of it isn’t. You both seem to conveniently ignore that fact.

Have either one of you ever flown an intercontinental trip at FedEx? Round the world in 5-7 days? 14-day single departure trip?

No big deal if you haven’t yet (or will ever). But, when you conveniently equate pax long-haul to ours, it’s pretty clear you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Can either of you definitively answer ANY of these questions below about implementing 117 at FedEx? No - you can't. None of these questions are “conjecture or half-truths”. They’re big concerns with answers that have the potential to drastically affect our QOL.


Will our pilots flying AM hub-turns have their groups of work days shortened and become more frequent and be forced into additional monthly circadian swaps as a result?


Will disruptions to our trips result in more incidents of pilots being removed and put in SUB?


Will our duty periods involving AM hub-turns be longer to accommodate rest requirements?


Will we lose our RFO on say, CDG-DEL, BOM-MXP, NRT-HKG (to name a few) if the company builds the trips to ensure we’re “acclimated” to that theater before departure? News flash to you both – No pilots at any of the major US pax carriers flying long haul go to work for 12-14 days at a pop and get acclimated to a theater half-way into the trip which would then allow 2-pilots operations up to 9 block hours.


Will the 100/28 rule or the 56 hours off (un-waivable) cost us money when our trips are dropped because of them? Will we even be able to make up that money when we can’t find legal make-up trips? Will the same rules deny my ability to be awarded a max pay schedule to drop using my vacation?

None of the above is worth denying the company’s ability to extend me to FAR limits or tell me I’m legal to finish since I was legal to start. I already have a solution to that. When I can’t bid for the trips I want or manipulate my schedule the way I want, there’s no solution for that. When I have to commute more frequently or the number of lines available shrink because less RFOs are needed, there’s not solution for that.

Neither one of you know what the end result of 117 implementation will be here. When you can make a list of actual, tangible positive safety and QOL improvements that are over and above what are currently in our contract and that is clearly eclipsed by what we will be forced to give up in exchange then maybe you’ll change the opinion of me and others like me. But there’s a lot more to my opinion than “we’ve always done it this way”.