Looking at some NB open times for this weekend, Crew Scheduling ought to start running the coverage ladder today. Looking forward to the "Memorial Day Meltdown" thread.

A5S

 

The choices shouldn't be give up batch sizes or turn off your phone.

With regards to abandoning batch size limits to solve their problem, that doesn't solve the problem of unwanted calls at 2am for trips you could never get. Then we just go back to ARCOS calling any and all pilots legal for a particular GS even if it's at 3am and the GS reports at 3pm. You could still have a pretty specific slip in that 25 other pilots senior to you have in as well and it'd call all 26 pilots...at 3am.

Chances are slim that all 25 ahead of you decline it but not impossible. So if we followed your advice, 'just turn off your phone!' then you miss that GS (based on specific parameters in this example, not a blanket slip) that you were willing to fly...because batch sizes are bad and handcuff the schedulers too much?

Without batch sizes, 9/10 times that's a nuisance call at 3am, but the other time you just missed a GS. And sorry, it's not acceptable to call all the pilots legal for a GS at 3am just because they can and it saves the scheduler a little bit of work, hence why we have batch size limits. I don't know if the details of the new batch sizes have been released yet but I'll be interested to see them.

 

first off, I never suggested no batch limits. I think they should definitely be increased and possibly a function of category size. I also never suggested increasing them at quiet hours. They should be increased greatly during the day. I get many many GS calls at 0300 now because it takes 12 hours to get down the list. Imagine them being able to get it covered at 3pm and nobody gets woken up at night.

 

IMHO, this particular issue is more of a thruput problem than a staffing problem. Some categories have enough pilots, but they’re not all reachable in time (without IA) in order to staff a trip to prevent a delay or cancellation. For example, ATL 7ER has over 400 pilots per seat. If a trip drops, how long is it going to take to get thru 400 folks with a batch size of 5? Someone within the group of 400 will be willing to fly it, but will the schedulers reach that individual in time to meet their operational needs?

This is definitely a management problem and not ours to own and solve. The solutions that come to mind are to either increase batch size limits to increase thruput, schedule trips further out (this won’t help on short notice or no notice requirements), or increase reserve coverage by hiring more pilots (takes time).

if they want relief from DALPA via batch and size increases, then DALPA shouldn’t just give this away. We should get something meaningful for it. Again, it’s management’s problem to solve, not ours. We should definitely get something in return if DALPA chooses to help.

 

Nope. Short call pilots are promptly available by definition. They prevent delays and cancellations.

 

agree. This current gs/IA method basically puts the whole category on short call for the ‘punctuated moments’ when the company desires it. increase the staffing.

 

If the senior GS person gets paid when the 23m.7 fun starts (if it’s caught), wouldn’t a blanket WS or OOBWS person bet paid first/also. It would appear they were skipped also in coverage.

 

Just to play devil’s advocate for a second…With greatly expanded batch sizes, trips would get covered much faster, less 23M7, so less guys with blanket GS in trying to get paid for violations with no chance of actually flying a GS. Also, with larger batch sizes, less chance to no chance of batch size violations, so less people putting in blanket GS just trying to get paid for those violations. And, if there was NO batch size, there would almost never be a 3AM call since trips would be covered in 30 minutes or less vs the HOURS it takes now.
I’m not advocating for no batch size limit, but increasing it has definite upsides. For those that keep claiming “we shouldn’t fix the company’s problems”, let’s be honest and admit that we (through everyone putting in a blanket GS just to try to get paid for violations) is making the problem much worse that it should be.

 

And when we say “the problem” we mean the company’s failure to staff categories with adequate reserves, right? If you imagine every category properly staffed with enough pilots to maintain adequate reserves for the flying we’re actually doing, there would have been hundreds more WBA and WBB positions on the last two AEs and a quarter of our airline would be sitting in more lucrative positions or at more lucrative and/or qol-enhancing seniority levels. We’d also have the ability to drop and swap on the 20th for the following month instead of hoping and praying negative reserve coverage math facilitates a swap 2 days prior to a rotation. Many more of our reserve pilots would have an extra X day. Fewer pilots would get unstacked. Fewer pilots would have to move X days. Fewer pilots would have to resort to suck leave use for schedule management.

The company is also exacerbating their own blanket GS problem with the world’s worst slip input interface. I’m not wasting an hour every month to enter precise slips because the company can’t figure out a way to make them cross bid months. And I’m not going to turn them off and on every time I have a cocktail because the company hasn’t put any effort into making that a more simple affair. I’m also not going to decline every offer I am not interested in because ARCOS won’t stay logged in, or because it often hangs up on login. And there’s no way I call scheduling unless absolutely necessary because the wait times are insane and unpredictable.

See the trend here? These are company problems, and I’m done trying to solve them.

 

So, let’s just make them worse…