CAL EWR

Special Really Late Edition of The Magenta Line
Today is Friday, May 29, 2009 and there are 10 items for discussion.


Item 1: As it Turn Out, a “Voyage” is a “Voyage”—and “Contact” is Actually “Contact”

We know you are familiar with our EWR-NRT crew from a couple of weeks ago. We are happy to report this issue resolved—with a couple of conditions. What could have and should have been handled locally between your Council 170 officers and Captain Fred Stankovich was, instead, elevated to the highest levels of our union for resolution. We were confident from the beginning that Captain Stankovich’s skewed view of things would not ultimately stand up to the scrutiny such things are given when they are looked at and judged by reasonable and unbiased people.

The settlement reached with senior management includes:

Full pay
No discipline or record of this incident in anyone’s P-10 file
An arbitration to determine who was right and who was wrong
A repayment plan for our pilots should they lose the arbitration

While it may seem useless for management to ask for an arbitration in what is clearly a safety-related case, we nevertheless welcome it. A positive ruling for our pilots, which we believe is the most likely outcome, strengthens us going forward whenever a misguided management missile is fired at us. A negative ruling, which we believe is unlikely, provides us with certain other weapons in our battle against petty and mean-spirited management—which is too often the normal way of business for our Chief Pilot offices these days.

From the day this unfortunate chain of events was dropped in our laps, your EWR officers worked in close cooperation with our MEC leadership, especially Chuck Cummins, to bring it to a successful close. We worked the local angle against Captain Stankovich as far as we could. Once Fred dug his heels in and refused to be reasonable, the MEC officers took over and carried it to the highest levels of management where it was resolved. We kept the fire under management lit and stoked it every week in The Magenta Line. Whenever a little more heat was needed, we were happy to throw a few more logs under Stankovich and Abbott. Heat rises, and the fires we lit locally eventually rose all the way to the top of Smith Street.

We are happy that this unfortunate incident will soon be just another chapter in how not to treat our pilots.

We are unhappy that we still have in place low-level flight operations management, from Fred Abbott on down, who have long forgotten they were ever pilots—and who conduct their business with us as if they had never been at the controls of an aircraft or responsible for the decisions we, as pilots, make every day. We are unhappy that our supervisors see themselves as our overseers and view our defeat as their success.

Fred Stankovich could have cut this one off at the pass, he could have been a pilot advocate, he could have taken his responsibilities to both the pilots and management seriously. Had he done these things, this affair would not have blown sky-high as it did. He could have taken Captain Vireilha’s advice and swapped the Tel Aviv crew for his; both trips would have operated and this would have become just another anecdote, good for retelling over dinner with the crew. Instead, Captain Stankovich’s actions ensured that not only was upper management forced to become involved, so was the Japanese government in both New York and Tokyo.

The duty-officer day started happily for Captain Stankovich as a wedding guest surrounded by friends and family—and ended in quite another way. Because he was impatient his day had been interrupted, he forced a crew into an untenable position—and he will ultimately pay the price other supervisors have paid for making similar bad decisions. His future actions will be scrutinized at the highest levels by those who had to clean up his mess—and they aren’t supposed to clean up messes. They hire guys like Fred Stankovich to do that.


Item 2: Captain Sees Red After Seeing Red Bracelet

Yesterday, one of our EWR Captains made one of those career-defining decisions—or maybe it really wasn’t all that, just something that will be talked about for years to come—and not in a good way.

Our Captain made the decision to tell a First Officer he was just about to fly a multi-day trip with to—get ready for it—take off her red FUPM bracelet or... or what? Not content with hurling this low-wattage lightning bolt, he made every effort to compound his tantrum by calling the Chief Pilot’s office seeking support for his “thinking”. The First Officer, making the rational decision that her relationship with this Captain was now tainted and essentially unrecoverable, asked to be removed from the trip. She was. Although she was initially given an emergency drop without pay, after intervention by our union leadership, she has now been paid. Management recognized that she was not at fault and, try as they may, could not justify not paying her.

Today, this Captain has likely elevated himself to Platinum status on the PBS “avoid flying with” list. We also heard that the CalForums thread dealing with this situation had so many hits it brought down the server.

Before we get knee-deep in the hoopla, let us first say that we fully support a Captain’s right to run his cockpit the way he wants—as long as he runs it in a responsible manner and does not create an uncomfortable or hostile environment for those he works with. In our Captain’s opinion, the FUPM bracelet is offensive. OK, what about those yellow Livestrong bracelets? What about an American flag pin on a coat lapel? What about the MD-80 stickers some of our pilots have on their flight kit bags? I mean, if anything is offensive, it’s got to be an MD-80 sticker—that whole airplane was offensive. The point is that there are other things to get wound up about—like, for example, the management philosophy that gave birth to the FUPM bracelets in the first place.

Fred Abbott has told us that while he does not like the FUPM bracelets (imagine that) he will do nothing to stop them. We applaud this dose of sanity from flight ops management—and encourage our side of the fence to fight the common enemy—which is not the guy or gal sitting across from you in the cockpit.


Item 3: Captains? BE CAPTAINS!

We started to hammer this last week and a couple of events since have highlighted this issue yet again.

We get paid to command and make command decisions. We are given all the tools we need in the FAR’s. Sometimes even the Ops Manual helps us out. We just had out NRT crew get paid and while management seems to think the Captain did not make the right decision, an arbitrator surely will.

The point is this: everything this airline does, from selling tickets, to cleaning the lavs, to catering the airplanes, to checking baggage in at curbside, is designed to do one thing: move people from A to B. And in the process of moving those people from A to B there is only one place on the airplane where every decision from outside the airplane can be accepted, modified, or overridden. It’s the ultimate place for stopping the buck: the left seat.

For far too long, we have allowed others to make our decisions for us. The Ops Manual has grown over the years from a couple of hundred or so pages to almost 1,000 pages today. Most of that growth was an attempt to diminish us as pilots and substitute canned words and responses for cockpit judgments and decisions.

We must decide: Do we want to be paid and treated as skilled and responsible professionals? Or are we content to be labor, operating our heavy equipment in the manner we are directed to by management and subject to their whims when we stray from the path they set for us—sometimes after the fact?

If you are faced with a decision, if you have to make a call, if you are treated with disrespect by your flight attendants, your ground crew, your caterers, your schedulers—or your supervisors—remember who and what you are: you are The Captain—and you are In Command of the aircraft. Command is sometimes an unpleasant task, and sometimes you must make decisions that will not be popular—but that is why you command instead of take a popular vote.

First Officers, you aren’t off the hook, either. Monitor and respectfully challenge your Captain if you see him shying from decisions or failing to stand up for his crew. We monitor and challenge when we manage threats and errors when we fly, why not do it outside the airplane, too? We can take control of our profession again—but every one of us has to make it happen; it will not be given back to us freely.


Item 4: Mr. Kellner’s Pay Calculator

Mr. Kellner did what he was supposed to this week: he overrode a poor decision by his flight ops managers and worked with our MEC leadership to solve the problem. So he gets a pass.

According to Forbes Magazine (April 30, 2008 issue) Mr. Kellner’s total compensation for 2007 was 10.3 million dollars. Extrapolating forward, this means that Mr. Kellner has made:

This week: $198,072.00
May 1, 2009 to date: $792,288.00
2009 year to date: $3,904,848.00


Item 5: No Summer of Love For You!

Despite the coming (or already arrived, depending on who you listen to) management proclamations of this being the “best staffed summer ever!”, we all know the truth is that it’s going to bite just like the last 25 or so summers at Continental Airlines. While management has computing power to the Nth degree, staffing formulas that would cause Stephen Hawking to shake his head (if he could) in bewilderment, and a traditionally empty summer school house, there will not be enough pilots to go around the system.

Now would be a good time to dust off the doorstop, open it up, and start to learn the contract. The UDO’s will be answering a zillion calls this summer so help them by helping yourself and KNOW THE CONTRACT!

And, please—do not call the UDO’s for other than truly time-critical problems.


Item 6: Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? Again.

In this week’s installment of the flight attendant hotel room confiscation plan update, we have this: Nothing. Yes, nothing.

We have discovered that the joint bulletin recently issued and just as recently rescinded is of no consequence. Yes, that’s because the flight attendants have it in their inflight manual that the ISM jumps ahead of some of our pilots. So while we have no bulletin, they have a manual.

The blame for this unbelievably sorry state of affairs rests with the usual suspects: Fred Abbott, Mike Bonds, and Tom (gag) Stivala.

If you’ve wondered why the flight attendants seem to be running flight operations these days, it may be because they are. Or at least that’s the determination you might make upon observing flight operations management. Fred Abbott, who could put out a bulletin telling the flight attendants to sit quietly in the back, has instead chosen a course of—nowhere. He is either too weak or too afraid of crossing the fearsome flight attendants or the HR department—ruled by Bonds and (gag) Stivala. Fred Abbott, who long ago forgot about being a pilot, has also forgotten about part of his current job, too—that of being an advocate for his pilots.

Nature abhors a vacuum—so, too, do our flight attendants. In the absence of a policy contradicting their designs on the layover rooms that should go to our pilots, they have neatly filled the void with a manual section giving them their choice.

And our flight operations management sits quietly by.