Originally Posted by
TED74
I disagree that in-basers and commuters share enough desires that all rotations should serve all needs. I really like a 12-hour 2-day with an early sign in and late checkout, or some 8-hour 1-days that aren't commutable front or back. I imagine those stink for commuters?
Are there a lot of people bellyaching that there are overnights? I don't hear these complaints in the cockpit or on layovers. Seems like a straw man argument or a complaint against an anonymous internet poster or two....I think the complaint is a whole schedule of non-commutable trips, and the way the system strings them together, which can yield a bunch of otherwise UNNECESSARY nights away from home.
I didn't say that all rotations need to be hyper commutable and also made of whatever gossamer that pilots who pretend they go to bed at 6-7PM and get 8 hours of solid REM every time say they enjoy. Insert your own hypothetical here, like one early leg to AUA, 24+ on the beach and one leg home. I'm not arguing for zero trips like that; they are fine...to a point.
But our current trips with fewer and fewer exceptions (thought there are some) suck for everyone. There will always be some early reports. There will always be some late releases. There will always be some trips with both. Its the prevalence of overlapping negative factors since the "optimizer" was given prime directive supremacy over rotation construction that is negatively impacting trips and QOL for more and more pilots more of the time. So much so that simply "living in base" (which sometimes means 2-3 hours, or more, on the road, each way...LOL!) isn't enough to get back to the pre-optimizer QOL *some* commuters (by air) used to enjoy not that long ago.
There will always be trips with negative factors; that's the nature of the operation. There will always be: early reports, late releases, redeyes, flights and overnights on holidays, legs per day, plane changes, long "sits", mad dashes across 5 concourses to a flight that's already boarding, reroutes to save the operation, long overnights, short overnights, shifting circadian windows, etc. The problem isn't any one of those things, or even some of those things some of the time. Its the sheer prevalence of more and more of them in any given rotation that force multiply eachother over time.
There's not enough PTC early risers to come close to 50%+1 on a TA that doesn't address significant rotation construction concerns. Not after the "running it a little hot" age of the Optimizer. Work rules will be a huge concern for C2019 IMO.