FA's bragging about 3 day trips or less.
 

Had a SLC flight attendant tell me they have nothing longer than 3 day trips. Now don't get me wrong, I know their trips can be really bad but why do we have mostly 4 and 5 day trips domestically?

Short staffed due to the VeOP, UNa and NQAT.

I thought this was obvious. We are getting optimized.

The optimization(s) will continue until morale improves.

Flight attendants are qualified on every fleet, we aren't. Our pre month credit would be too high if all our trips were 3 days or less.

Flight Ops prefers to overspend on premium pay rather than planned for credit cushion.

“Here’s a dollar, let me pick up that penny.”

Had a commuting flight attendant complain that their 5 day trips all dried up and she had to do all 3-days.

They are qualified on every plane. There are 5 subsets of domestic pilots (717, 220, 320, 73N, 7ER) because they can be utilized on more aircraft, that allows for them more flexible trips and to be able to open bases in more places like BOS, MCO, FLM(FLL/MIA) etc. that allow them to keep domestic trips to a shorter duration.

Think about what might be different in scheduling pilots verses flight attendants.
Hint: They have worse work rules and are qualified on all equipment.

As far as 5 day trips Delta did not do them. Post merger with NWA they eliminated them in the NWA bases. Huge complaints from pilots so they brought them back because we asked for them. Be careful what you ask for!

That needs to be made into bumper stickers for our roller boards 😄

The FA's definitely seem to have better trips than us on average. Any 30 hour layovers I've had recently where the FA's also had 30 hours they were on a 3-0-3 leg 3-day trip. The one downside I've seen is they have a higher number of long (3+ hour) sits than I've come across in my own trips.