Originally Posted by
BoilerUP
I don't insinuate.
What some people call "excuses", others call "reasons". Our network is fundamentally different than passenger carriers, and drives how airplanes and pilots flow through the system. If one wants to actually address an issue within Art13, they have to fully understand the "why" in order to devise multiple ways to address the issue while anticipating and mitigating potential downsides.
Nothing changed in Contract 2016 that made trip or line construction "worse" than Contract 2006. Schedules took a dive in 2018 with implementation of the Solver optimizer, combined with a growing air network that gave the solver more flying to build duty periods containing more segments/block than historical, and duty/rest closer to contractual limits. COVID demonstrated the impact of optimization in spades, and Postal has again highlighted areas that need new or revised language.
Compensation (rigs, etc) is absolutely a way to drive desired scheduling changes, and in a perfect world works in unison with duty/rest and line construction language to influence how the Solver builds trips.
I'm all for using pattern bargaining to help obtain contractual provisions other pilot groups have...but we have to determine what our actual top-line objectives are to determine if their provisions will actually achieve for us what we hope they would.
The solver is exactly what I was getting at. You’re correct that there was very little language change in 2016. My point I was trying to make is that simply blaming our network and the way we operate as the sole reason our schedules have deteriorated is incorrect. You never mentioned the solver until now. That is the biggest reason for our schedules being worse than before. It has nothing to with “how we operate”. I think anyone who comes to UPS knows how we operate, or at least they should.