I'm on PAYBACK DAYS!

And I went to a Supercross race!

Even worse.

 

I’m just a dumb SWA pilot who barely passed econometrics, but that’s not even 1 standard deviation of variance.

Id love to know what those numbers jump to in response!

 

Apologies for being pedantic, but significance is dependent on the distribution and standard deviation of the population being sampled. A swing of 0.4% given the limited total number of trips on NYC220 very likely doesn't meet the actual mathematical threshold of statistical significance.

 

nerd alert!!! 😚

 

I think they were thinking about the holidays that the office is closed and they are off.


As of early 2026, over 15 states and Washington, D.C. have enacted laws allowing employees to use paid sick leave to care for family members
. States with comprehensive paid sick leave laws include California (base), Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts (base), Michigan (base), Minnesota (base), Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington (base), with Alaska implementing mandatory sick leave in July 2025.

The company keeps forgetting that they have to follow employment laws in other states besides Georgia!!

 

Let's say for a second that the increase in sick usage is a direct result of the MOU and has nothing to do with an unusually severe flu season.

I would still argue (as others have alluded to in other threads) that it is primarily due to pilots who previously might have flown sick to avoid the pain of the verification process who are now making the right call after applying the IMSAFE checklist. Personally, I don't believe in calling in sick just because I have sick hours available, but I also never let the verification hurdle bully me into flying with "allergies".

The true sick leave abusers out there don't care about verification... they have ways to cover their butts. I think the company will continue to see increased sick usage even after verification is turned back on since the change to allow telehealth lowers the inconvenience threshold for those on the fence.

 

I've been accused of sick leave abuse.

Last 4 years I've had about 500 hours.
350 of that was surgery and recovering from surgery.
100 or so was in the run up to FAA leave which the company/insurance wasn't very helpful with.

So about 50 hours used for random illnesses over 4 years. But I'm an "abuser"

 

If it was at DAB did you rush the track and take a berm home?

 

I used NYC as the example. All the other NB fleets show a similar upswing, making the result "statistically significant." It isn't due to random variability. It's company wide, not category specific. NYC 220 was just an easy example.

 

No one said the increase is random. We are saying that it's wild to claim that it's abuse using a nearly negligible increase. Additionally, the increase occurred during one of the worst national flu outbreaks in 25 years. That could easily explain the increase in sick usage. What has the increase in GFB calls been and have they resulted in rejected usage? Has sick usage nationally increased this winter? What about your peer airlines? Has their sick usage increased? And even outside that, has the presence of a look back dissuaded pilots from making a proper IM SAFE determination for fear of getting too close to the annual look back?

The Office Space-esque jumping to conclusions was without any merit. Has there been an increase in sick occurrences? Sure, I grant that (let's put aside that they chose to highlight occurrences and not total hourly usage). But if the pilot group as a whole was abusing it, sick usage would be through the roof. But it's a modest, nay minor, increase in sick time usage. Small increases like these are much more likely explained by season viruses and illness than abuse.