Pontius Pilot, I thought I had your ID pinned, until you mentioned something about being married. Something fishy with that

Anyway, just to give you an idea about staffing… At the moment the Jet side is fat and the ATR side is slim. So slim that management is spreading people out in a big way. Screw Scheduling is getting very creative lately. In fact, I think they take into account the contractual 2 “junior man” per month when making decisions. I personally have been “junior manned” at least once per month for the last 4 months and managed to dodge twice as many calls. Captains are getting nailed even worse. One ATR FO I know got called for a “junior man” to sit in the captain’s seat. He was a captain two months before and displaced to FO. He got nice chuckle of letting them know about his current situation. We are still trying to figure out the legality of it if he had actually done it.

I had an instructor pilot in the jump seat for a few legs this week. It seems the major hold up in ATR staffing is not the lack of bodies but a clog in training. FOs will get through ok, but our FAA POI is making the Captain transitions tough.

In Miami we had a few people from Crew Scheduling, Dispatch, Crew Planning and Crew Resources for a nice little “meet and greet.” I suppose it was intended for all the crews to meet the people in charge of our lives and hopefully smooth over some recent hard feelings.

What I learned: None of these people really know W_T_F is going on. They do the best with what is handed them. Crew Scheduling has NO control over how many pilots they have. All they can do is shuffle and pressured to make things work. The Crew Planner is given a schedule from someone from AA. They are the ones that dictate what routes that are needed. He just tries to make everyone happy but that obviously isn’t going to happen. Crew Resources actually may have had a decent plan, but they have no idea how the training is really going to go and have to make decisions on unknown and ever changing variables. These are not departments under one “know it all being.” They are separate and think only within their own compartment.

That is the way AA corporate structure is. You have your job to do and very little communication or control over anything else. This is what the business world calls “internal controls.” Separate people’s jobs to a great extent to help prevent unethical behavior. It doesn’t really work and creates huge inefficiencies, but that’s how big companies are I suppose. This is demonstrated everyday on our day to day job. Hell, If the FA needs ice, they tell me, I tell operations, operations tells the chief of cabin services, cabin services gets the message and makes it to the plane when they get around to it. Now imagine our frustration when the Electronic Weight and Balance doesn’t match the Load Sheet. I SEE the rampers, but can’t talk to them. I gotta call Ops, who then calls the crew chief who then calls the ramper. The problem has to be communicated through 3 different lines, fixed, and then sent back through 3 lines. Such simple matters cannot be solved directly. Now apply this type of structure to mid level management, and instead of a line, make a web.

The point is the structure PREVENTS ANYONE FROM SEEING THE BIG PICTURE. THEREFORE, THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE CREDIBLE SOURCE. I don’t care what your heard from “any horse’s mouth.” I don’t even care what HR says. Chances are they don’t even know when they are hiring again. And don’t get me started on the training department. Please, those people are so far removed it’s ridiculous. There are as many opinions in the training department as there are instructors. I know, I made a point to ask each instructor I ran into about divesture. Each person gave me a completely different opinion from the last person.

I hope this post was insightful
/rant