Originally Posted by
Balker
It’s funny he/she used the term “steal”. Regular pilots don’t have a say, period.
Now one has to wonder how much pairing building influence has the union scheduling committee. It is impossible to think that the pairing optimizer it’s building layovers in FLL to do day turns. Bringing a crew from another base and having to pay 2 hotel nights per pilot to do a CTG day turn makes zero sense from the cost perspective. It should be a day trip for a FLL crew. As a matter of fact, all Central/South America/Caribbean turns should be day turns and not built into trips. They pay block (except very few exceptions) so there’s absolutely no cost advantage into inserting them into multi-day trips to balance the trip rig out.
problem is that you’re looking at it on a single turn or multiple turn situation. It might cost a couple hotels but they may be saving anywhere else in the system making a crew from another base more productive (less soft time or requiring less overall pilots) by having an out of base crew come and do turns in a different base as part of a 4 day.
You’re looking at it on a hotel cost and hard block turn basis not a global solution across the system. I can bet my next paycheck they wouldn’t be paying the hotels and would have in base crews doing those in base turns if it were cheaper on a network scale. It’s not now but it might be as new and different flights and city pairs or frequency are added. That’s why when we had hard lines some months we’d have 20 day trip lines and the next month it would be only 4 with all the choice flying farmed out to other bases, and then the following month 20 again. It’s all because as the entire network schedule changes the optimizer makes the lowest cost pairing build with overall cost in mind. That might mean spending what may seem like unnecessary $20,000 on hotels for flights that could be in base turns but saving $21k in scheduling efficiencies elsewhere. To the company they saved $1,000 but you see $20,000 in hotels.