ALPA Scheduling Help- FAIL
 

Is there anyone else that thinks the new system of e-mailing scheduling and hearing back a month later is acceptable? Do we not give them enough money? Are there not 3 full time paid( prior) Delta Scheduling managers and a team of pilots on flight pay loss to help with scheduling problems. But don't worry, your ALPA monthly magazine is on the way. Seriously, ALPA Scheduling is nearly the only touchpoint a pilot will have with their union in their entire career. If we need a 13,000 sq/ft building and a staff of 150 to answer scheduling questions promptly then we should have it, that's what we pay for. ACTUAL HELP. Good forbid we cancel a few hospitality suites or the Lets Hold Hands Committee.

Rant over.

There are currently 34 emails in the inbox with oldest one being from March 1st. So, currently we have around a 2 day response time. It is possible your email got lost in the mix or accidentally deleted. Feel free to PM and I’ll personally work on your issue.

Our schedulers do a fantastic job with what they are given. There are only a handful of people working in that office and this is the most efficient way to do it. If they need more info they will call you. Lumping in our volunteer people with the shenanigans that our elected reps do is uncalled for. I get your frustration when you want an immediate answer, but I still believe there is a number to call if you need that for FAR violations.

For all I know, you’ve already done these things, and I feel your pain. In any case, I’d be interested to know what percentage of the solicitations for help from our volunteers could have been avoided by any of the following:

1. Calling scheduling
2. Reading the contract
3. Talking to the CPO

I have absolutely no problems with the volunteers and/or ALPA scheduling employees. They are excellent and under appreciated. I have a problem with not being able to pick up the phone and talk to someone. We pay enough for someone to answer the phone, including asking stupid questions.

Suggestion:
-Every day, or every week, update the DAL/ALPA website, and all social media accounts with the number of outstanding scheduling inquires, and the time in hours that the average inquiry is being answered.
-Starting tomm, blast out information on how to get scheduling help on every ALPA communication we receive. Weekly, monthly, everything.
-Poll the pilots on budgeting priorities. Ask them to rank how important it is that pilots be able to call the main ALPA line and get real time scheduling help. For all scheduling issues. It would rank #1. I think we all know that.

"Skin in the game"?... I would guess that by making you sit down and compose a logical question(so as not to "ask stupid questions") you have to have a few facts. In doing some minimal fact gathering, prolly the majority of the time the answer to the stupid question becomes self evident. Also, I'm sure, the 1 stupid question usually morphs into multiple stupid questions. With the current process, it is prolly much more efficient and enhances the volunteers mental faculties( I don't like to think of my fellow pilots as stupid)

To be a boomer, I relate this to raising kids. When doing homework, they initially thought that by asking me to help them find the answer it was going to save them time. After I realized the game, the "game was up". When asked a question, I made sure that my answer was anything but easier for them. They quickly realized that a little bit of self motivation ended up being the easiest solution.... so how does this relate to scheduling? ALPA scheduling has realized the game is up. They now make you email your questions and, voila, it now is what it is.

The world according to Garp, at least this Boomer's view.

How are they supposed to ensure they answer everything in order.

For example, if you have a scheduling question that isn’t 117 related immediate need, and there are 30 emails in the box, why is your question more important than someone who emailed 2 days ago?

would you be okay with calling and explaining your situation and being told “okay we’ve logged your question it’ll be answered in the order received, which is currently running 2 days” or something similar?

Or are you demanding that your question is more important than the other people who have sent a question first?

In a previous life, I was a scheduling committee volunteer, did it on my own time, no FPL... it FORCED me to know the contract intimately. After we got frustrated with the company schedulers started “freelancing “ when they had to solve problems, our union started putting a union rep in OCC, all day, every day to watch the schedulers. Sound familiar? I did that work, it was tedious and boring at times. But, when a scheduler rerouted someone, or tagged a reserve with a trip that the crew member thought was inappropriate, all they had to do was say “transfer me to the union rep, and I answered the line, I had full access to the company schedulers system and notes... I could verify the trip legality and look at the bigger picture for fatigue issues. Most often, I had to tell them to put their big girl panties on and go fly the trip. Occasionally we coordinate with the company schedulers and compromise.

My point is that having a rep in scheduling may not be a bad thing. They don’t need to do the company’s job for them, and it will usually cause a scheduler to think twice before “freelancing”


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I’m suggesting that we beef up the Scheduling Help department of our union to include answering calls in person. That way your rhetorical questions about “rationing” scheduling help don’t have to be reality.

If your kids paid you $30+ million a year, you would answer every question they had. I mean, all of them.

And here endeth the lesson....when they have to deal with attitudes like yours.....no wonder they went to an email format;)

You had a reasonable offer by someone that appears to be a scheduling volunteer and he also gave a very reasonable explanation as to what the current wait time is,.... were neither of those to your satisfaction? Did you want answers, or were you just venting? I'm sorry if my conjecture hit a little to close to home, I put this more in the arena of my wife venting and when I think she wants "help or reasonable explanations/answers".....things go sideways....kinda like they did here. I hope you find the solace you deserve.

Thanks man, yeah I think I finally found my safe space. It’s 2018, when you could call ALPA and get a question answered by a nice person on the other end of the line. I’m definetely venting, but wondering if anyone else misses the old system where a person was generally available to assist with questions. I realize that by asking this my attitude is poor and I should just be quiet and keep sending the checks. Thanks for straightening me out.

They stopped answering emails awhile ago. The only way to reach the scheduling committee now is through the template on the ALPA website under the scheduling committee's page.

-no, that's just silly.
-how to contact the committee since this change has gone out probably 5 times since the phones were turned off a few months ago.
- there are people available to answer real time FAR issues 24/7. Every other issue is not time critical. To have 24/7 every scheduling question support would probably be 10 more full time FPL people at a minimum--completely unnecessary. Just because you want an answer to something immediately, doesn't make it truly time critical. The way to contact the committee was changed to get answers to pilots faster--and that's exactly what it has done. We would have pilots email in, then call 45 min later because they didnt get a response to their email they just sent. We work on a first in first out basis.
- sounds like you want to volunteer to join the committee?

We can do that. It is however very expensive to add full time employees. Much of what they deal with is as mentioned in other posts items the pilots should be able to look up in 2 or 3 minutes. Many also neglect trying to solve the issue first at the CS level. What clogs the system is a small group of pilots who spam the system with every possible perceived issue without taking the time to make sure they have a reasonable claim. As applies to so many things 5% of the pilots generate 95% of the workload. The pilot who has a real issue gets hurt time wise as a result.

I do my homework and heavily research the PWA and SRH before reaching out. I also typically contact scheduling unless doing so might potentially make my situation worse. But the email system sucks because sometimes the rep doesn’t understand your question (sometimes my fault, sometimes theirs) or their answer creates a follow up question which requires another round of emails. Plus drafting an email does take time; it isn’t instant. Most of my scheduling email interactions of late could have been resolved in 3 minutes or less via phone. So I’ll be more fine with the email system when we finally get a scheduling rep stationed inside of scheduling.

True, wouldn't it be nice to be able to talk to someone. If only there was a way.

outside of an IROP, this is a very accurate statement. That being said, i encourage all pilots to fill out the form about reroutes if they are unsure...I have no problems researching legal reroutes. We do however have a hand full of pilots that will fill out the form constantly just fishing for things.

So when you call a 1-800 number and they let you know your wait time or place in que, that's silly? No, actually it's pretty smart and people appreciate the honestly. If we are going full internet on scheduling help, it's really the least they could do. Not because anyone is entitled, but because it's reasonable and smart to maintain confidence and transparency in the system.
I personally believe that we provide ALPA with an adequate budget to be assisting pilots by phone (as an option) with scheduling questions. If a pilot wants an answer right away, that is their right. They provide adequate resources to ALPA so that no persons' questions should be divided into time critical or not buckets. Now, if Scheduling Help is an entirely unpaid, volunteer department, then I entirely rescind my suggestion and we should be thankful for what we get. I've personally volunteered a minimum of 1,000 hours of unpaid volunteer union work and never received a dime of compensation. If you volunteer your own time, then you owe me nothing, I owe you. But as far as I know, we have paid volunteers and staff doing that work. If in your opinion, you would rather keep your ALPA Monthly magazine and Family Affairs Committee social budget over an additional full time scheduler answering calls, then that's your right. I personally believe that the budget should begin with building out the most utilized ALPA resource (Scheduling Help), and then go from there. I have suggested to my reps that we poll the pilots on this issue, and put forth a resolution reallocating a higher percentage of the budget to a robust Scheduling Help department.

I echo this. For example, guy gets a Green Slip, Green Slip NOOP's, then trip gets re-instated. Then said pilot gets 23K'd back into it. What does it pay? You could read over PWA 23.K and 23.J for an hour. You would be no closer to knowing the answer. Truly, could break either way. Wouldn't it be nice to make a 3 minute phone call with a person who's dealt with this 4 times in the past month. Thats how it used to be. Now you have to spend 20 minutes typing out an online questionnaire and really have no idea when you'll hear back. I mean, ok, I guess. But, wasn't the other way better? Can we not afford to have both? We aren't dropping quarters in the bucket, it's hundo bombs every month. Plus, didn't the MEC Chairman reveal a few years ago that less than 30% of pilots even know their ALPA login?

My takeaway from a briefing by the scheduling committee to an LEC meeting was that essentially we as pilots don’t have the tools to know if reroute pay is due. Is that not true? How is one ever sure WRT reroute? Naturally I can evaluate the return-to-base delay trigger defined via PWA, but not the timing of a leg becoming uncovered (relevant for grievance settlement reroute pay NOT defined via PWA). It is this type of reroute pay trigger that spring-loads many of us to hit ALPA scheduling with a request to investigate if Delta scheduling is unhelpful.

I’m hopeful that an ALPA rep embedded in scheduling (as Delta should have allowed years ago) will nip much of this in the bud.

Just my recent interactions with both ALPA scheduling and Crew scheduling, they seem to not know the contract as well as in the past.. I've received outright wrong answers from both and when I showed them where they were wrong they apologized and said I was right. Problem is If I didn't know my contract I would have taken their answer like it came from a burning bush and would have lost money.

You’ve suggested they put forward a resolution, or you’ve actually authored one? I think if you do the latter it could gain some traction - particularly if you clearly define what you want. “More robust” won’t necessarily solve your problem. Do you want a business hour call center manned by enough staff to keep hold times under X during non-IROP conditions? Call center with place-in-line annunciation and call-back logic? 24-hour desk? Perhaps you want all submissions to have an option for call-back response instead of email response?

Some of this obviously comes from a loss of experience with early-outs, but it also comes from poor coding. Rather than interpret the verbiage of the contract, both Delta and ALPA have been guilty of validating a pilot’s gripe by seeing what the system shows regarding pay treatment or historic handling of odd corner cases. It once took me over a dozen calls with ALPA/CPO/Scheduling Sup to be paid correctly for reserve during a month containing MLOA. All three parties looked to the pay system (which was coded incorrectly) for the answer instead of reading and applying the actual text of the PWA. The coding glitch was rectified, but I have no idea how many blissfully ignorant pilots went underpaid over the months or years that the system was programmed incorrectly. I’ve talked with other pilots who have had to hand-hold Delta through discovery of other coding anomalies, so this is apparently not uncommon.

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Times, I always appreciate your perspective and tone, but I have to agree with mike here, at least conceptually. Maybe not every day, but it really shouldn’t be that hard to put a banner on the very web-form folks fill out with a “hold time in cue as of X”. It serves both of your interests, and helps manage expectations for the dues paying members.

Seems like very low hanging fruit. So, I ask, why is that silly?

sounds like you should volunteer for the scheduling committee...or at a minimum submit a resolution as you state at your nexst LEC meeting.

The reason there isn't something like that is because it's very dynamic. Some days we get no emails, some days we get hundreds of emails.

Are you actually trying to get an answer to something? or are you just going for a good ole fashioned rant fest? you had one person reach out to you offering help, which as of a few hours ago you haven't used. I don't see any scheduling forms in the inbox from a mike a....so what's your end game here?
I touched on it earlier, but we dont have that because pilots get impatient. They will send an email, then call 45 min later. Different people handled different mediums. the 'pit'--the full time ALPA staff answered phones. The pilot volunteers handle emails. Things would get double worked, wasting valuable resources and time, delaying responses to other pilots.

L.4 note is the one that you really can't see. L.8 and L.9 are pretty transparent to the pilot (which is essentially what you have said). A lot of L.4. notes get triggered for auto review, the issue lies when the violation consists of a deadhead after operating, those don't get auto triggered for review.

I'll preface with the statement that I am IT challenged with writing programs and algorithms. I'm not aware of an auto response system that can generate an auto response with the number of emails in the queue. Even if there were, # in queue are only a small indication of response time. Some emails could require hours of research, while others could be responded to in under 10 minutes. I'd say a good rule of thumb is outside of an IROP, response time would be 3-5 business days. IROPS obviously take longer. I'd rather under promise and over deliver. Some days, we are able to respond within 30 minutes of receiving the email.

Wait you heard back?? I'm still waiting in my 3 day greenslip pay I was denied illegally

go on.....

We are currently training several new volunteers. It's a pretty significant learning curve for the first 6-9 months on the job. Apologies for any lapse in quality and just know we do our best to have supervisors or experienced personnel review any emails before being sent out.


Edit: To anyone who's still emailing the DAL Scheduling email address... it is not monitored or responded to. Please use the "contact the committee" tab on the ALPA MEC website.



We have a "Scheduling Optimization Team" that works directly with the company on coding issues and other minutiae to help resolve things like this. A lot of the response from the company is "we know this is an issue, but we don't know how/can't/won't fix it."

ALPA volunteers and staff on the Scheduling team have been terrific in my experience. The end game is finding out if others think that we should have more of them and/or if we should reinstate the phone line for all questions. I personally believe the current system is worse than the previous one. Tunes, you defending yourself isn’t necessary. And suggesting that if I volunteered my time, everything would be fixed is in err. If you haven’t seen a submission from me it’s because I’m waiting for the rotation that I finished to be “Closed” by the company. To see the final result for pay. Because I know I’ll have to research the latest way to make a submission and then work to explain the question in a way that makes sense. That’s easy 30 minutes. End of the world? No. But talking to an ALPA scheduler would be much more efficient and a nice thing. In essence, the new system is more cumbersome to the pilot and I’m sure is resulting in fewer inquires which was probably the point. Probably great for you, not great for me. Again, the funding should be there to stand up a team to answer calls. Have you ever been getting ready to text someone and you realized it’s just too long or complex and just decided to call that person instead. That’s pretty much how I feel about scheduling issues. Not a fan of the current system.

So....to sum up your self acknowledged "rant".....you don't even know if you have a problem, haven't contacted ALPA scheduling, haven't contacted(called) Delta scheduling, haven't contacted(called) your CPO, and haven't waited 30 days for a reply? And, as of now, the wait for an answer is 2-3 days? Bad on me for assuming too much by your original post. But you are ready to rant IF those thing happen? Got it. (It did however take 4 pages for you to paint a more accurate picture of YOUR situation)​​​​



BTW....that 30 minutes that you might spend composing an email has been frittered away on this thread. But I thank you for taking one for the team in trying to rectify this systemic ALPA scheduling email time waster.:confused:

LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, Sheriff Buck Rogers.


I rarely post on the forum, but it's clear that you're the resident troll with zero contributions. The type of person that over time people will just skip over. I believe the Scheduling Help system is inadequate in comparison to systems we've had in the past. I've come to the forum to see if others feels the same. Seems to be a mixed bag of some who prefer the ability to talk to someone, some who are ok with the system, and others who really have nothing to say other than the typical internet hero posturing.

I've done what the majority of pilots do:
1) Phoned a friend
2) Read the contract
3) Called a scheduler
4) Reached out to ALPA Scheduling Help

But you see Sheriff, it's very unlikely this will be the last time I need scheduling help. So, while it's convenient for you to pretend this is about a single instance, deep down, I think you understand we're talking about the system going forward. I believe pilots want to be able to call and speak to someone who can help. And if ALPA decides to move ahead with polling the issue, you will probably see for yourself the overwhelming preference to return to that system.

In any case we clearly need an automated system that flags all reroutes, 23K, NOOP etc things for review. If the software can handle it, great. If not, then until it can, then every case needs to be manually reviewed automatically.

There's just too much incentive to play the "deny deny deny" game. The average line pilot doesn't encounter these types of things often enough to be current and proficient in knowing if its legit or not. We can't rely on pilots taking the initiative to look into it at every point of contact because a lot will slip through the cracks that way, almost by design.

Deny deny deny, then pay up only on the cases that are identified and pressed, is a perpetual motion machine windfall for the company.

You are correct and I am going through the same thing now. There is a problem in the automation that we are short enough for me to illustrate at will. After months of being ignored, it has been realized and IT is trying to figure out a coding solution.

As much as the schedulers do need good tools, they also need some common sense and authority enough to do their jobs.

ALPA scheduling could have been the heroes on this.

In my experience calling ALPA scheduling while helpful they will make you feel terrible for calling them and doing annoyed the entire time. No matter who you called first.

The schedulers don't even have the technology to see when someone is NQ, hence they keep assigning us (me) shortcalls, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that they don't have the technology to properly avoid illegal re-routes, double 23K, or properly assign greenies.

That has been my experience since Bill was let go.

What’s that saying about depth perception? FYI, one issue with SC in 20+ years, regardless of who’s on in.

Dunno.

I value product over politics.