You have to go back a few years .

Operation humming along. Then a shake up in flt ops and and a change in principle. Optimizer 2.0 and the cult like actions to drive the most efficiency out of this group. That's where coverage issues first started. Then we had a cascade of events leading to batch size give away, pre- posted rest and now the PB rug pull. All the time they struggled with coverage.

The simple answer all along was hire the proper amount of personnel. But that contradicted the efficiency do more with less mantra - do more with less won out as they were still running on basically the latency of a once well functioning machine. They've coasted as far as they could, the machine is out of momentum and we are at the bottom of the hill that needs to be climbed but there's nothing left in the machine.

So now the announcement of some decent hiring. Is it enough? No. But it will help Hopefully they recant in the PB pull and that would help as well. As far as running coverage our IT is terrible and that has also been an area neglected for a couple decades. We're going to need a person in charge that understands this and can convince the execs and BoD that investments must be made. Otherwise we will continue to struggle as compared to others and certainly not be running the machine we did not so long ago.

 

I can think of some things that they should not do, like have such an adversarial view towards pilots. Have stopped hiring last year for no apparent reason. Plan to run the operation on an insane of amount of premium. Build trip with no buffers in them. Make crew scheduling a low paid, entry level job. Make moves in crew scheduling that has a bunch of your schedulers quit. Try to buy a better coverage ladder for pennies on the dollar. Poke pilots eyes every chance they get by "what's a SIL," "it's not a violation until an arbitrator says so," "racketeers," "all of your PB days are belong to us now," the list goes on.

We are where we are today because of conscience decisions by leadership. Things ran along pretty smoothly before we had a massive cultural shift in leadership. Somehow, other airlines manage to run their operations without calling their pilots 10x a night for premium flying.

 

How about these trips with 3 hour sits before your penalty lap? I feel like they're effectively using us as free airport standby to cover reroutes.

 

I haven't seen those yet, but those used to be common. I guess what is old, is new again.

 

…except that’s not free anymore. You’ll get sit pay, reroute pay if they do need to use you, and the long sit could very well force EDP that day, which starts paying you like a green slip every minute after 10 hours. Those financial taxes on the optimizer shape its solutions, which I’m actually fine with. And for those who don’t want the end-of-rotation penalty lap - you can now try to release yourself with a jetway trade. I’ve picked up a couple of those as a local in the time we have had the option.

 

A 3 hour sit pays 30 extra minutes. Combine that with 50% for a 3 hour block reroute and you're now paid an extra 2 hours for all that nonsense.

Ain't nobody picking up penalty laps on the JWT board in my category. Why would anyone come in and fly a turn for less than ADG?

 

I've seen those penalty laps posted roundtrip for straight pay and wondered who in tarnation is picking those up? I figured they would't be posted if pilots didn't take them, but I haven't thought of a rational that would get me to work to fly a ATL-RIC-ATL rotation for straight pay.

 

I'll take that bet. Rip is right it's all about perceptions.

 

No. Dispatcher background IIRC.