Originally Posted by
frieswiththat
...Spoke to a co-worker at the sim factory yesterday who's husband is at Continental. They have so much open time the next 7 days it's a wonder the airline will be able to operate. And this is after all the furloughs. Shoot yerselves in the foot.
Really??? I just looked. Even on the 737 the coverage is better than 5 to 1. For example on the 24th out of IAH there are 4 trips in open time with 24 reserves and on the 25th there are 5 trips with 36 reserves available. It's about the same out of EWR. On the widebodies the coverage is closer to 10 to 1. A lot of reserves are getting the week off. True, there are a lot of trips "advertised", meaning guys are hoping someone will pick up their trip, but there's very little open time. I just spoke with a friend in the crew room yesterday who's on 737 reserve. He said he's flying about one turn a week right now. For the month he's flown 29 hours.
I think we'll operate just fine, unless we get hit with a heavy EWR storm, and having the furloughees back for that wouldn't make any difference because crew scheduling would, as usual, still be overwhelmed. I really wish we had a compelling need to drive the company to return the guys on furlough, but unfortunately it doesn't look like its there in the current schedule.