What Happened This Week
This week began as any other award week. We started running the captain awards as soon as the bids closed and the company could finalize the files. After almost three full days of running and examining the results for hundreds of runs, we went to meet with the company to reach agreement on captain runs. Our LOA 11 defines the calendar where the captain and first officer runs must be agreed to by 1200 on the 20th or we use the coin flip procedure. We came up with a calendar to split the captain and first officer runs because of the “No-Fly” list and the tagging of line check pilot trips. This worked well for the May awards. We have to have the captains agreed to and loaded before we can get realistic results from the first officer runs. This split calendar allows us to get the captain runs agreed to and then work on the first officers for an equal amount of time.
Unfortunately that didn’t happen. When we met with the company, we were very disappointed. The runs the company produced had used Unstacking or Ignore Crewmember Requests in an effort to reduce open time. Some of them did not comply with contractual limits and it was a very frustrating meeting.
The focus of the discussion was that the company felt we were not using all the tools available to achieve the desired result. Our position was that they were trying to use a sledge hammer when they really needed tack hammer. One area of major contention was how unstacking is to be used. Their wish was to unstack 75% of the month up to the contract limit of 30% of line holders. This was unacceptable to us.
This is not what Unstacking was intended for. Unstacking was agreed to in the LOA in order to address a stack of open time caused by a holiday or particular weekend, not to force flying on to pilots because there simply aren’t enough pilots to fly the schedule. We made our position clear and although the company disagrees, we will not accept the use of unstacking to address staffing issues. There are appropriate applications of unstacking and it may have to be used in those situations.
They also used Ignore Crewmember Requests in some runs. Ignore crewmember request will ignore a pilots PCT. This forces the system to attempt to build your line up to the TLV. This is supposed to be used as a last resort, not a common tool used every month. We felt that our bid runs, all without ignoring and unstacking, accomplished almost the same result without impacting bids. We did accept one of their runs that did not include ignore or unstack.
The company’s recurring issue each month is less open time and more reserves. They would like to see 15% reserves with 0-2% open time. We would all like to see this. The only way to get less open time AND keep the reserves at 15% is to have more pilots flying.