Yes, yes, and yes. But you are never required to answer your phone. Ever.

 

Yes, No, Yes.

It’s a robo call that tells you which rotations are available for IA. If you want one, it will tell you to press * to connect to Scheduling. They will eventually pick up and have no clue why you’re calling.

 

This … absolutely!!! … their decision to abandon the coverage ladder shouldn’t let them abandon finding where the trip would have went without 23m7. Have you brought this up to the union??

 

Ive been following this thread and I may have missed it but I would greatly appreciate anyone that could explain this. What exactly is prompting this apparent sudden surge in IA's? I'm used to getting green slip calls constantly and then suddenly out of nowhere not a single greenslip and now everything is an IA call from scheduling? Does the implementation of 18hr LC play a roll?

 

It's the trips within a few hours of report that are going IA because Scheduling is invoking a clause in the PWA allowing them to skip the coverage ladder to get the flight covered ASAP

 

Maybe some of them. But managers from CS have been stating on multiple base visits it’s mostly due to the ARCOS batch sizes and not being able to get through the massive numbers of people with blanket slips in, bogging down the process. And they just resort to IA to get it covered.

Not saying it’s an excuse, just that it’s their explanation.

 

No, because 18 hour LC isn't even in effect yet (starts June 2). IA's are generally going out for 2 reasons. First is that something pops up very short notice, roughly under 2 hours to report, and there's basically no time to run the full ladder. ARCOS batch limits mean they can only call 5 people every 15 minutes for WS/OOBWS/GS, whereas with an IA they can blast basically everyone in the category who is legal. The second thing that causes IAs is that a trip pops far enough out so the batch size is extremely small, or only 1 pilot every 15 minutes. But then it has to call 60+ people with slips in and even as the report time gets closer and closer ARCOS is locked into that 4 people per hour rate. Eventually the clock runs out and scheduling just dumps it to IA close to report.

I've said it before, but probably the easiest fix is to have scalable batch sizes the closer in to report it gets. So right now if a trip pops 12 hours to report it's a batch size of 1, and it is stuck at 1 pilot every 15 minutes even if you run up to and past report time. ARCOS needs to be able to increase each callout size on a rolling time schedule. So 18+ hours the batch size is 1. Then when it goes under 18 hours it starts calling 2/batch until 12 hours to report, then 5-12 hours is 8, 3-5 is 15, 1-3 is 30, under 1 hour is 40. Or something like that, make up your own numbers. That would eliminate almost all our IA issues.

 

So essentially, an abnormally large amount of pilots have blanket greenslips in that don't intend to fly them to begin with bogging down the system, made worse by the fact that we are growing the airline (both in demand and # of pilots) and now more and more pilots are sitting in coverage ladders that take way too long for CS to run through because of batch sizes meant for smaller pilot group comprising smaller categories under less demand.

SOunds like we'd be seeing tons of cancellations and reroutes like last summer, and this is their attempt at slapping some Flex Seal tape on a crack on the Hoover Dam

 

Pretty much…

 

A scheduler told me this week that they are going straight to IA at 3 hours prior to departure. That’s not an ARCOS batch size issue.