Originally Posted by
20Fathoms
Exactly this. And the more people bail them out, the more they will gamble. The last time I got a no joke get here ASAP short call they asked how long and I told them 2 ish hours as I was sitting at home. The girl seemed genuinely surprised and repeated that my report time was in 12 minutes.
I told them to relay to tracking and she said they would but they boarded the flight on time anyway.
VAS is a thing. I would bid it, but they make a conscious choice not to use it. That’s on them.
Similar scenario here as a fairly new FO.
Saturday afternoon, sitting on the sideline of my kids soccer game when the call came. Note: from the field it's an easy drive home, change, hop back in the car and make it to employee parking lot in 1:35-45 (even if I miss the bus, I can be in ops BY 2:hrs).
Like you, I said I'll be there as soon as I can. They tried to nail down a time and I said about 2 hours and off I went.
With MiCrew having the crew contact number, I shot the CA a message with my best guess 'gate time'.
When I got to the gate, it was completely empty. I went down and got on a fully boarded up airplane and did 'the late guy walk' with the passengers and FAs all looking at me. Grrr.
Captain looked at me and said "Thanks for the message, it helped me make a plan". He then proceded to tell me that he'd done the walk around/interior preflight, PM and PF preflights, loaded the box and was 100% ready to go. He saw I was a little bit flustered/rushed and said "Relax. Build your nest, review the box and preflights and we'll go when WE're ready."
He picked up the mic and made a PA to the passengers that, now that the entire flight crew was here, WE could complete our preflight and safety checks and be underway in 20-30 minutes.
I found out later that the CA had said specifically how far out I was, but the GA insisted that they board anyway.
All we can control is ourselves.