THIS. the solution isn’t complicated. Hire more pilots and man the reserves robustly.

Any fix outside of this allows them to avoid it.

S
 

A couple thoughts I had today re:QS.

What's the over/under on how many days we are into March before the first 23M7 > QS award goes to the same pilot? I.e. pilot harmed is pilot awarded QS.

Following that, I also wonder if 23M7 will start to trend deeper down the seniority list as seniors are now more able to reliably get QS and are therefore unavailable for 23M7 over the footprint.

Hmm...

Why would the senior people FLY the trip when they can sit at home and collect 23M7? If they wanted to fly it.. they could of done it at the GS stage (if not bypassed) or the IA step..

That's a fair point, but I also imagine that there's some seniors out there collecting 23M7 that were willing to fly IA's, but couldn't get them. But now they can do QS.

23M7 = 1x WS/OOBWS or 2x GS value
QS = 2x
Sr. "Affected pilot" could theoretically get 4x trip value if they are both the harmed pilot AND the QS recipient. It all depends on what step CS skips.

A skipped (“harmed”) pilot always only gets single pay for the rotation, even if the step skipped was a GS step. At Delta you only ever get premium pay for what you actually step foot on a plane and operate. You never get double pay for what you don’t operate.

After reading a dozen or so pages of this it I reminded of my prior sentiment in a different thread: DL is worshiping profit that doesn't care about DL in return. We need schedulers and reserve pilots to staff uncovered flying, not an increasingly complicated staffing decision tree that attempts to make more money with fewer resources. I am all for premium flying being available to this pilot group, but the frenetic state of scheduling whack-a-mole has shown that the depth of the pool is over our heads (sorry for the mixed metaphor). It's time we migrate back toward the shallow end.

As a number of posters have pointed out, everyone has been focusing on the problems in the trip coverage, without realizing that the sheer volume of open time is unsustainable and indicative of a completely different set of problems, including staffing and trip construction, both of which are completely within the company's control.

If you don't have a lot of open time, the trip coverage problems are moot, because the system works just fine at lower volumes. When you try to put 20lbs of stuff in a 5 lb sack is where there's a problem.

If someone calls in sick inside of 18 hours, you could have a million pilots and it could still go to 23m7 because of the current situation.

take this a step farther. if someone calls in sick 24 hours prior, CS can be so undermanned or overwhelmed that they decide to not deal with it until within 8 hrs of report. that's the decision they appear to be making with a lot of trips in the last few months.