Originally Posted by
captnate702
I'm calling a bluff on your post: How does staffing model prevent 100% of my seniority being disregarded? If 100% of my seniority can be disregarded in my bid then how does a staffing model prevent that from happening? Even with extra pilots, if they can just disregard my seniority then the staffing model is irrelevant? what am i missing?
Besides: Don't Jetblue, Spirit, Alaska, Frontier, and others all use Navblue for PBS? you're telling me all of those airlines' management can disregard 100% of the pilots' bid? Again, i'm calling BS. There has to be a reason no other airline has a 0% unstack and yet navblue is still a regularly used PBS. We can talk about industry standard all we want for work rules but i hope the union is not overplaying their hand on this, i just don't see how that helps anyone. No way MG will allow allegiant to be the first and only airline with a 0% unstack in a PBS - again Delta is the highest at 30%.
Either way, you seem to believe that AR is still on his 0% unstack position and that hasn't changed during negotiations? i honestly don't know because my sources either don't know or won't confirm what the gulf is for work rules they just say we its light year apart for PBS. Your post makes me think that the unstack/PBS stuff is the huge disconnect with work rules. if that is true then i was probably wrong about getting a contract by 2024 at the earliest - we won't get one until 2026 at the earliest.
Also: what is smartpref? how did we bankrupt it? i see something about crewing solutions and smart pref but that's it on the google machine.
last one: why isn't any of this stuff in the contract comparison? why doesn't the union put the other airlines staffing models into their contract comparison slide show? hearing AR try to explain this piece away on his recent video makes me more pessimistic, he strikes me as trying to reinvent the wheel or something with this unstack stuff. no other airline has it and to bring up united's staffing model just seems bizarre, like he's grasping at straws. we have enough to fix in this contract why draw a line in the sand that goes way beyond what any other airline has...
this whole is starting to smell like a d*ck measuring contest between AR and MG and the losers will be the pilots.
I'm not bluffing! lol But for real... I'll try to answer as best as I can. I have a level two or three (maybe) understanding of how the entire system works, but here goes.
First, Yes, as I said in my other post. Several other airlines use NavBlue and as I said in that post, they counter the unstacking with a staffing model. For example, (made up numbers to explain the concept) if there are 8 flights that need to be staffed, the staffing model will require 15 pilots. X% reserve coverage, plus a couple for days off, plus a couple of guys on vacation, plus X% slop. This ensures that if #1 Pilot wants off, there is coverage for that guy to have off and for there to be guys on vacation, etc. An example of a staffing model would be what united has which is something like this: Block hours/87 + 12% Reserves + charter hours/87 + sick hours + vacation + Training = Staffing. That way the airlines have enough people to properly staff the flying while also accounting for all of the sick/vacation/training/etc. Our company routinely plans on utilizing VFNs and OT pick ups to cover flying. If they had a required staffing model, they wouldn't be able to do that.
I covered the "how does a staffing model fix that" portion. Now for the 100% disregard portion. With 100% unstacking, they would have the ABILITY to disregard 100% of your bid. With 0% they wouldn't have any of that ability. Functionally, if all the lineholders wanted off, it would build reserve coverage/lines to cover that day with reserves (and I believe one or two extra reserves in case something happened). Functionally, since it is an algorithm and not a person doing the scheduling, it is unlikely that it would disregard 100% of your bid. It would run thousands of iterations to come up with a solution that would create the least amount of impact. However, if you're the number one guy in base and want day X off and you don't get it because it was the least amount of impact, are you going to care? No, you're most likely going to be ****ed and complain about how you got screwed by the PBS system.
Thus, you either need 0% unstacking OR a staffing model that requires them to carry enough pilots to prevent that from happening. I think the line in the sand is that MG doesn't want either of those so that the company can continue to understaff the airline to save money.
Again, I'm not an expert, just have a passing knowledge of how it works. There are probably less than a handful of people who know intricately how the back side of the PBS system works, and none of them work for the company lol
As far as SmartPref, maybe you weren't here or missed it somehow. The company and union worked with SmartPref for a couple of years trying to work out a PBS that fit our ridiculous CBA. We would have been the first major airline to utilize SmartPref for their primary bidding software and SmartPref went out of their way to rewrite code to fit (free of charge) our PBS. At the end of the day, they solved the problem and had a completely functional PBS for our CBA and the company said nah, we'll keep CBI. The company was so ****ed that they decided to shut the doors. They even wrote a whole article blasting Allegiant and its culture. If you are one of our pilots, do a quick FB search on the official page for "SmartPref." I don't think the whole article is still available, but in one of the posts about it AW copied a couple of the lines from the article in the text. And if you were really interested, I'm sure someone still has the full article if you ask.
I agree, if you haven't dealt with PBS or taken the time to call AR to have him explain it, it's pretty damn confusing. Hell, it's pretty damn confusing even if you do that. As far as the contract comparison goes, don't know. My guess is that the stuff in the contract comparison is industry standard stuff and a staffing model isn't necessarily industry standard in a way that could be utilized here. SWA is still using line bidding for example. To be fair, I'm not sure how you could do a staffing model here with our base structure. There isn't a staffing model that would cover LAS/SFB and cover TYS/BLI. If we had a system-wide model, the company could still understaff individual bases and overstaff others.