Was kind of shocked to see the Union's pairing analysis for May that shows a surprising amount of duty periods over 10 hours....... around ~60% of them. I never realized it was that high, no wonder I feel exhausted after every sequence.

What can we do to fix this? I know other airlines have increased compensation for pilots who work more then 10 hours in a duty period. But there seems to be a large contingent of our pilots, mostly from more senior folks, that say if we implement this at AA it will just make things worse. So what else can be done?

 

”son it’s just the way we’ve always done it”. If your tired fatigue that’s all I can say. And guess what look more in-depth those long long MCO-PHX-ORD for example last day of trip days because they know you want to get home are almost on every pairing and you won’t fatigue because your going home.

 

Wait… How would getting paid to be on duty longer than 10 hours make the schedules worse? If anything it would incentivize the company to make them better so as not to cost as much…

 

Ah this conversation again.

The people FOR this provision say that the schedules can only get better. The people against it say you just don’t know what the optimizer will do. Or, that the optimizer will have less 1-3 day trips and more 4-5 day trips. Or that you’ll end up working more average daily credit trips. The 18 hour 3 days will be gone and you’ll get more 21 hour 4 days.

We own some good trip mix language that secures a % of each pairing length, but supposedly the company would want to adjust those if we get the >10 hour duty 1:1 pay.

For everyone who says wow this 13 hour duty day would pay X much now!! Well, the trip would probably not exist that way with the 1:1 >10 hours.

Anyway, that doesn’t account for maintenance or weather delays. You could almost bank on flying lower time and getting paid the same.

 

We can simply reverse what got us into this mess. Sit pay is very cheap for the company and they love long sits. Get rid of those and the 10 hour duty days disappear.

Unscheduled sits pay (current book), no scheduled sits over 2 hours (solution).

 

When we added long duty day (<10 hours) and long sit (>2 hours) add pay at United, both long duty and long sits both became rather rare within a few bid periods.

 

This is a perfect summary. The last time I talked to an APA rep, they are looking into the 10+ hr rig paying only for IROPs/Delays which sounds pretty good to me. Keep the trips to fewer days but get paid if there are delays.

 

Same at Delta.

 

I think it should be 100% for sits over 1.5 hrs scheduled and 50% for unscheduled

 

Idk if the company would want to pay per diem, accommodations, transportation, and another daily min just to avoid paying 1-2 hours extra for the CAs and FOs. At UA, the company migrated to 2-3 day pairing length to maintain the integrity of the operation, not to avoid long duty days. Just a data point here is all