That won’t affect me unless they are going to reduce IA calls, in which case, thanks.

I’m in my 9th year here. I’ve flown with many super senior guys on 3 different fleets. NOT ONE SINGLE TIME have I ever met anyone that even CLAIMED to be paid for a 23M7 violation. Are they paying? Are they just telling us they paid the senior-most pilot and lying? If they don’t have to publish a list how would we know?

That would be nice info to know. I’m sure the Union has the data. I’ve seen them highlight the number of hours recovered on several emails.

I have several outstanding ACE reports pending for this very reason. I’ll let you know what I hear back.

YES.

...........................

so is taking out your blanket GS request...

I received a 21 hour plus payment one month and 10:30 payment another month added to my timecard. I assume they were for 23M7 violations, but I have no way to prove it. I believe someone called them on it and they paid me instead of the pilot that called, but again I have no way to prove it.

You can always call and ask scheduling. It's in their schedule notes that we can't see.

ancman removing their GS (if they have one in) will do nothing to stop the VRU calling about IAs. But you knew that.

Actually, it does, indirectly. The fewer GS there are in the system, the faster ARCOS gets through the coverage list, which reduces the chances that it gets to the IA step.

Sure, if you get buy-in from the pilot group (or your BES, at least) that no one will have a slip for anything they won’t fly.

In reality, ancman is still gonna get IA calls whether ancman slips or doesn’t.

that has nothing to do with it. we were discussing unwanted phone calls and being disturbed. people are mad about getting GS calls for trips they won't get. I'm saying it's as easy to take your blanket slip out to avoid unwanted calls as it is to block the VRU number for IA...maybe you didn't know that

Forgive me for thinking all the mentions of IA calls had anything to do with IAs. That’s my mistake.

ok you are forgiven...we all make mistakes

Why freely give up contractual leverage that our pilot group currently has?

My thoughts exactly. It is my contractual right to have a blanket slip in. Period. This is a company problem to solve, and I sure hope ALPA got a meaningful quid in exchange for expanding ARCOS batch sizes.

OK, but then don't whine when you get a call that disturbs you.. you guys don't seem to understand the issue. I could care less if you have a blanket GS in, but there needs to be a way to get through trip coverage faster since everyone does. if you're gonna complain about getting calls for trips you won't get the solution is to take your slip out or turn your phone off. what's so hard to understand?

it’s not hard to understand. Some folks simply think the problem is not green slip and ia coverage ladders. The problem is insufficient staffing, which is a company problem to solve.

You won’t ever find me complaining about getting a GS or IA call that disturbs me. I have the VRU and ARCOS numbers silenced if I’m not interested in flying at that particular moment. The blanket slip stays in though.

Getting through the coverage ladder faster is the company’s problem to solve. They will ultimately need to provide a quid for any contractual relief.

I agree 100%..just wish they would have done that in the PWA

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…

I agree with you. I just ignore the phone calls until the day prior that I’n willing to fly. (2 days starting in June)

From a purely tech standpoint, there has to come a moment when retrofitting this dinosaur to work on modern operating systems is no longer efficient

The company pulled back from their initial summer flying plan. Had we tried to fix their problems a few months ago, I imagine that pull-back may not have happened. I don’t believe we can save them from themselves. They’re either going to remember they care about NPS and brand loyalty or they aren’t. They’re either going to keep paying triple for premium flying or they aren’t. They’re either going to recognize pilots don’t default to extending anymore or they aren’t. They’re either going to stop creating fatiguing rotations or they’re not. They’re either going to accept that Ops can’t meet Network’s demands or they aren’t.

Bigger batch sizes are lipstick on this pig. Thank goodness my family isn’t counting on flying anywhere they absolutely have to be this summer. Sadly I’m having to tell friends and neighbors to buffer their travels for the foreseeable future.

You’d think so, although we had crews ripping paper from a dot matrix printer and taking it into their DC-9 until what like 2014? This place is literally a time capsule sometimes.

Why help when they chronically understaff (or over extend) the categories and build crap/fatiguing rotations? If they're going to continuously and flippantly utilize a portion of the contract clearly meant to be the exception, not the rule, why would guys not do the same in kind?

Didn’t say we should help, but large numbers of people putting in blanket WE and GS, when they have no intent on flying is not really a ‘company problem’. They may have created the environment, but we are making it worse.

Absolutely. The company operates to the very limits of our contract as much as they desire, to the extent that we’ve had awful rotations for years now.

I keep a blanket slip in because it’s contractual, and because it’s most convenient for me. The company may not like that, but I don’t particularly care. Just as they don’t care when they push our contract to the limits in situations that benefit them.

Talk through what you propose pilots do, and to what effect.

I beg to differ! Before we had batch size limits I got numerous ARCOS calls during 'quiet hours' (let's say midnight to 5am?) that were remarkably similar to my example scenario. I.e. the trip was many hours away and they had plenty of time to cover it by calling only one pilot at a time (the respectful thing to do), instead they called everyone at once and woke up 10-15 pilots needlessly. And again...hence why we have batch sizes.

I agree that batch sizes need to be tweaked and maybe we need dynamic limits based on how soon the trip starts. But don't think for a second that they will magically cover trips more logically without batch limits.

As to the harvesting of violations with blanket GSs, maybe if they didn't violate the batch sizes so much pilots wouldn't all have GSs in to catch those? I mean, this is a multi-billion dollar corporation right? They should be able to handle programming ARCOS to correctly follow the PWA? :o