Originally Posted by
DALMD88FO
Just my recent interactions with both ALPA scheduling and Crew scheduling, they seem to not know the contract as well as in the past.. I've received outright wrong answers from both and when I showed them where they were wrong they apologized and said I was right. Problem is If I didn't know my contract I would have taken their answer like it came from a burning bush and would have lost money.
We are currently training several new volunteers. It's a pretty significant learning curve for the first 6-9 months on the job. Apologies for any lapse in quality and just know we do our best to have supervisors or experienced personnel review any emails before being sent out.
Edit: To anyone who's still emailing the DAL Scheduling email address... it is not monitored or responded to. Please use the "contact the committee" tab on the ALPA MEC website.
Originally Posted by
TED74
Some of this obviously comes from a loss of experience with early-outs, but it also comes from poor coding. Rather than interpret the verbiage of the contract, both Delta and ALPA have been guilty of validating a pilot’s gripe by seeing what the system shows regarding pay treatment or historic handling of odd corner cases. It once took me over a dozen calls with ALPA/CPO/Scheduling Sup to be paid correctly for reserve during a month containing MLOA. All three parties looked to the pay system (which was coded incorrectly) for the answer instead of reading and applying the actual text of the PWA. The coding glitch was rectified, but I have no idea how many blissfully ignorant pilots went underpaid over the months or years that the system was programmed incorrectly. I’ve talked with other pilots who have had to hand-hold Delta through discovery of other coding anomalies, so this is apparently not uncommon.
We have a "Scheduling Optimization Team" that works directly with the company on coding issues and other minutiae to help resolve things like this. A lot of the response from the company is "we know this is an issue, but we don't know how/can't/won't fix it."