Please help me see the light.. I obviously don’t understand this math and decision making.

If there are .. say 20 jets RON in BOS or MCO or AUS there has got to be 40-45 (some international) pilots in the downtown hotel rooms at $300+ each. Every night/365..


Why in the world is it more expensive than opening a pilot base?

Is it possible to have a base without a CPO?
Without crew room, pilot lockers and commuter rooms?

Parking lot cost, I guess?
In all of our bases parking lots are in the least favorable locations, but could this cost really be more than crew hotels plus crew transportation?

There are airlines with a lot more bases/total number of pilots ratios than DAL - how do they stay in business?

 

Schedule has to be built around the pilots returning home as the flying crew at that particular base. It's inefficient. The optimal schedule would be pilots stick with the airplane forever. In the Part 135 world, this is how it works; if they crew swap, the company buys a ticket or a rental car to reposition. The fact that the schedules have to be built around certain people returning to a certain place means it makes the overall operation less efficient. Deadheading in Part 135 isn't really an issue because the charter rates include all these costs. Deadheading on company means less potential revenue per seat used. The dollars spent per night per pilot for hotel rooms and per diem are far less than the reserve pilots you'd have to keep around at that domicile. Now that pilots can 'live' in that base, they can drop trips, call in sick, personal day, etc. out of that same place. An overnight really only risks crew timing out, or severe sickness, in which case one reserve from one base is deadheaded out there. Now consider that the cost to the company per employee is like 50% more than they pay him, with their share of FICA taxes, health insurance, training, etc. you can see that hotels are, for an accountant, a far easier cost to quantify, and less than a domicile. There'd be no domiciles in a perfect world from management/accounting standpoint.

DL has more nonstop routes on the A330 type from CDG than it does on the A350 out of LAX. But you could obviously see how it would cost a lot more to make CDG a base. Same reason Hawaiian doesn't have a mainland base. Extreme examples, sure, but it proves the point.

 

A couple of points:

The company is not paying $300+ a night for those rooms - we have long term contracts with a set number of rooms, I'd say we're paying $150 or so a night for those room, perhaps cheaper.

A crew basd requires reserve pilots, so there is the cost of having reserve pilots in place. Of course, they have reserve pilots in the bases currently covering the BOS trips, but I'm guessing there is a inherent number of reserve pilots just required for the operation.

Crews are much less likely to call in sick mid-rotation than they are are the start of a rotation. I'd bet that they reliability of the crews leaving BOS is higher than the same crews leaving their crew base.

More bases work when there are a lot of out and back trips - that's why the ULCC like Allegiant has them. As I understand, they often fly base-LAS-base for example each day. Simple, no layovers. In a complex operation like ours, it is possible for the crew to fly BOS-MCO-BOS, but that sucks up that "efficient" flying and puts the non-efficient flying into other bases flying. That's why Crew Resources prefers 4 and 5 days trips when the staffing is tight. Longer trips allow the computer to optimize the solution better than it can with shorter trips. If you take out the out and backs from the giant schedule, it forces less efficient flying (which more expensive) on the remaining trips. Thus, the overall cost of the flying the schedule might actually be higher with a Boston base than without it.

Training - a new base provides an opportunity for everyone to bid, irregardless of seat lock. This increases the training churn required, as CR has said repeatedly, we just don't have the extra sim capacity to do this. They might be mudding the water a bit and using this as an excuse, but that's one of their lines.

 

​​​​​​To add, not everyone will be a local. Any trip starting before the first inbound increases the chance of a miscommute. I'd be willing to bet most of those trips created would be early starts and late finishes. If would be a commuter nightmare.

 

The OP brings up a great point. Take BOS for example on the 330. No Pilot base, so every time they have to break up a 6 day it adds a DH and usually a DH only day. That cost waaaay more than the Hotels. I think it has more to do with training churn. Paid moves are also a factor but these can be minimized by opening small and then growing. In base reserves as mentioned above also add to the cost so in any case it is a lot more complicated than it initially appears. I think at a certain critical mass it is cheaper to open a base but it is the start up costs and increasing training burden that seem to generate a lot of procrastination.

Oh yeah - there is also the fact that marketing is schizophrenic and we change equipment when the wind shifts. Just off of memory we recently had 777 and 747 Pilot bases at airports with zero flights on this equipment. IIRC we did it twice on the 777.

Scoop

 

And in the same 'flight numbers-to-pilot base' upheaval, we now have more 7ER departures out of DTW and MSP than we did when we had ER bases there.

 

I agree, but they don’t, look at how many 330/764 trips hit another crew base in the middle. JFK and ATL on the 764 have a large number of trips that overnight in the others base. But they still do it, despite how many get broken up. For non bases like BOS/CVG/RDU the options are limited, but across the other WBs it’s still prevalent.

 

Last month at Propel event in ATL, PB stated that right now BOS is cost neutral as in the cost of the DH's and hotels rooms are currently the same as costs to open BOS as pilot domicile. With that in mind, if BOS continues to grow, it would at least make opening BOS the smart move from a purely $$$ standpoint.

 

Doesn't have to be that way. JB is similar in size in BOS as DL and they have 3 fleets based in BOS right now. While they don't have WB flying yet, there is way more than enough NB flying for DL to open a crew base and there has been for years.

Why we haven't yet is marketing's absolute dominance over flt ops. Tney want the "flexibility" to instantly scuttle and surge any one fleet's flow through BOS on a whim. Therefore any base DL opens will be subject to being chronically under/over staffed in the blink of an eye. IMO that makes the 330 a better case for a base than a NB, but that defies tradition.

IMO we will have a BOS base with probably 2-3 fleets either this year or next year. But they have to reduce the training bubble first because a new base would initially increase it and eventually decrease it.

The silliness about lockers and V-Files and commuter rooms are irrelevant. Even a CP is a minor expense and could be "persuaded" to fly a lot more than just for currency.

 

Just one data point:

As an AUS commuter I have nearly 50 hrs of deviated deadhead credit in the past 3 months with about 40 in/out of AUS and the rest DFW and IAH.

Looking at the June packet I should have more in my future too…