what fleet Crewdog?

 

Hahaha. The only base that is mostly unwelcoming to the shorter trips.

 

To be fare when the company opened these NY bases they put out a lot of info on why they opened them and what the need was. It was driven by a desire to have in base pilots to cover the early departures and late arrivals and reserves for the NYC weather issues among other things. The company put out this would drive a shorter trip mix and low commutability. Prior to having the bases we had real reliability issues from the NYC airports. It improved dramatically with the opening of the bases and NY went from one of our poor performing hubs to a great success story.

 

when did we not have an NYC base? Also there is no reason we can’t use the crews that lay over there to cover early AM departures or build 3-5 day trips that are commutable on at least one end. Unsure if true or not but I thought the NYC base trips went to crap in 2018. FWIW from those I’ve talked to at UA, B6 and AA their NYC base trips are not nearly as awful as ours.

 

Yep.

The awful trips there persist in complete defiance and denial of the fact that it is, and always will be, a mostly commuter base. They are the result of the "optimizer" from 2018+ trying to wring out an extra drop of on paper staffing efficiency. Its not because "New Yorkers like to leave early and get back late" as was actually said once. If that were the case then the airports would be ghost towns for most of the day instead of constantly slammed to capacity.

Trips could be built far better while still preserving the operation. If an LCC can do it with bare bones staffing so can we. Its also hard to operate several redundant fleet types from numerous bases in an attempt to drive a tiny increase in downline productivity but that's more a function of going to war with the army you have.

NYC is indeed a "success story" in that its much better than in days past on all accounts. But that's not because of completely tanking almost every pairing ever made for the base since 2018. That was more about one extra drop of efficiency from the "hey look we 'found' 800 pilots worth of fluff we can harvest!" than it was about preserving the operation. Flights leave every minute of the day almost always at or near max capacity. Pairings could be built better and the operation kept in tact.

 

Agree with your post but I believe there is a restriction on how early west coast crews can report on Eastern time. Seattle crews seem to overnight there a bunch and a 5 am show is a 2 am show body clock time for us…..

 

0500 pilot base time is the earliest departure allowed per the contract for Slc, Lax, and Sea crews in the east and central time zones.

 

This goes back to the original build up of NYC after the Pan Am purchase. Layover crews proved highly unreliable for early departures even back then when we had 4 day west coast trips with 3 NYC layovers and 5 AM shows for all of them. Layover crews would be delayed by weather and or mechanical issues and be illegal to depart in the morning or not even arrive. We were getting crucified by business travelers for our poor performance other than the shuttle which on the 727 was our only narrow body base in NY. Pilots from other bases complained bitterly about the early NYC departures. We almost planted a 727 8 miles short of 9R after a crew exhausted by early NY departures lost all SA and thinking they were high went idle boards and broke out of the clouds at 800 AGL to a face full of pine trees. They rounded out quite low. This led to many improvements in work rules and a change in basing strategy.

 

That’s all fair and makes sense. But why the early sign ins and late sign outs? I’ve succumbed to no fully commutable trips so now I search for just the earliest sign out. NYC this month on the B side is really rough for the 320. And it wasn’t always this way.

 

Partially true - that goes for PBS line construction. As far as Reserves go, being based in the "wild wild west" does not come into play. How it usually manifests itself is reserves getting called out to cover a trip for another base. It can result in some really heinous body clock transmogrification's and result in fatigue calls. I realize that we have to allow the company to cover trips, I just think out of base reserve usage should be further down the coverage ladder.

IIRC the last time it happened to me it resulted in something a like 1230 to 0100 body clock wake up mid trip.

Scoop