Schedule Quality Decreasing
 

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a continual downward trend in schedule quality, specifically on the 320? It seems like every month that goes by the trips get worse with longer duty days, tons of block time and short overnights. Fewer and fewer good trips to even bid for in the first place. Plus the line credit window keeps getting pushed higher each month. I’ve noticed this specifically since about a year ago around Q2 2025 up through the current bid period. It seems nobody holds anything tolerable unless you’re in the top 10% in your base and seat. What is going on?? Is this all intentional by the company?

I'm sure the lack of hiring last year didn't help. Negotiations coming up. Summer is upon us. Could go on and on but expect it to continue for the foreseeable future.

73 trips are pretty good. Plenty of 2 leg or less a day trips

I see this on my commute. Years of 320 guys longing for the demise of the 757 and now as they begin to enjoy FL laps, nothing but frowns on the JS.

shush!

nothing to see here! 😁

My last 1-1-2 leg three day trip was terrible I tell you....terrible! 😉

No change on the widebodies (except for that brutal 2-man BOS/LIS -- yikes.)

Depends on your base I guess. Looking at next month, there seems to be a fair amount of 1 and 2 leg days on the 320. Of course there are plenty of 3-2-3 trips as well. Trip quality has been down across the board since about 2017ish. Flew plenty of 4-leg/4-days and 2-leg/2-days back then. As the daily guarantee ticked up, they started adding turns on the front and/or back of those trips and killed the good times. 0xxx trips will always be the goal for this guy, as we have an aversion to building enough day trips to fill more than two or three lines.

But the yoke! And no tray table! Unjust working conditions!!

I mean, if they flew it EWB-LIS or PVD-LIS it would basically be a domestic flight. (I was a minority in my HS there for not being Portuguese or Cape Verdean)

the HNL-SLC 2 man redeye is a festering turd as well.

It’s incredibly base dependent. NYC and SEA see far more 1-2 leg days than ATL/DTW. So when I see all these new hires jumping out of NYC to DTW/ATL like hotcakes, I know I’ll see them right back in NYC shortly 😂

there’s a lot that goes into this but the short answer is staffing. We are very understaffed and the company now quietly admits it.

also depends on your base. I’m assuming ATL since those are some of the worst.

other contributing factors

The 73 tvl is critically close to the limit so they’ve had to offload some flying in order to stay under it.

320 routes especially out of ATL seem to have higher frequency and shorter stage lengths. Meaning they can squeeze one more turn in without hitting duty limits. The 73 and ER also have some of that of course, but not quite as frequent as the 320 and 717.

Penalty laps have decreased a good bit but only on the 4/5 day trips. 3 days are basically always 3-2-3. Even many of the 2 day trips are 3-3. 4 day and 5 day trips are some of the best. But 5 days are almost 50% redeyes.

It’s not going to get better until the company increases the staffing numbers or decreases the block hours.

Someone was on here saying we're seeing a big reduction in block hours next month, so we should have all kinds of good trips!

No one said big

Hasn’t been 2-man for a few years now, thankfully.

[QUOTE=It’s not going to get better until the company increases the staffing numbers or decreases the block hours.[/QUOTE]

Seems like the company pushed a contract through that they now regret, and withholding staffing is the only way they can claw back ops costs. It’s such a dangerous slope to play on though… any more and the operation could publicly crack in a very bad way.

Went back and looked and you're right, but the initial posts really seemed to insinuate that it was something significant.



I seem to remember some discussion about some of our short Europe was going to 2-pilot ops soon, so that may be changing. Short Europe was terrible enough with 3-pilots, can't imagine 2.

While not significant in terms of percentages, pulling 10k hours out of the bid packet shortly before it's published due to external events is notable and significant

I'm trying to follow you here. WRT rotation construction, is it significant or not? Are we going to be surprised by better trips or not?

Podrick, sadly that’s not true. This month BOS-LIS is all 2 man and it departs around 11:30

I've chatted with some pilots who wanted to push for higher ADG in the next contract. Just realize if this is what you're asking for, it's not "free money", the company will keep optimizing trips into higher block so we're not really benefiting, just working harder. Ask some of the older guys how some of the 1 leg duty days were before ADG was a thing. IMO it will always be better to have a pick of how efficient you want your trips rather than force everyone into optimized garbage. We're seeing some of this now.

this right here.

the rotations should be largely unchanged from April. Small reductions. Certainly notable going into a typically big growth month. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see small tactical reductions through the month if fuel prices continue to rise. Especially on low volume domestic routes

Be more senior.

It seems no matter how we might perceive as a win in improving trip construction, the company always find a way to manipulate it to their advantage. Seem it too many times in past contracts. The usual, “we didn’t think they’d do that”

I don't think so.

There's a hard upper limit on how much optimization the company can get in a single day driven by the block hour limit. And it's not a continuous math problem. It's discrete, with major, hard constraints that govern how much time can be squeezed into one day. Stage length, turn time, wind speed, maintenance delays, connection time, etc, all factor in. It's a variation of the knapsack problem. Dropping the ADG gives the company complete and total flexibility to build rotations however they want. Do you think if the ADG was 1 hour we'd have a lot of 15:45 3 days? We'd probably have a lot of 3 days that would be straight block at like 11 hours. Think 4x Vegas or Charleson turns in one day, 3 days in a row. Likewise, if the ADG was 8 hours you think they'd be able to figure out 2, 3, 4 day rotations all with 8-9 hours of block? Across the entire system? And make it work? No way. Low ADG drives pay for block; high ADG drives credit. Forcing a higher ADG creates a constraint problem for the company. Yes, they are incentivized to increase block with a high ADG - that's good for us.

Want proof? Which rotations tend to have the highest leftover credit/day? They're generally the shorter rotations because less optimization can happen given less days to shuffle work across.

Not on the 717. As far as bid packet trips, by far the most credit is on the 5 day trips, followed by 4 day trips. Almost every 2 day is 6 legs and ~10 hours of block, and most 3 days are 8-10 legs and 13-15 block. The 4 leg 1 days also tend to end up right at 5:1-5:15 block. We have some 4 and 5 day trips that are basically hard time, but those are the exception not the rule. Of course that is just the byproduct of having the shortest average stage length of all the fleets at DL. Whenever the 717 finally bites the dust the optimizer will be able to pinpoint rotation construction for all the other fleets since it'll have a much larger pool of short hops to work into rotations with transcons and other longer legs.

Thats odd, I saw next month it’s augmented. It was augmented last year on the ER as well.

The rumor when it became 3-man on the ER was that it was only for summer delays, not pilot rest.

BOS-EDI and I think DUB were unaugmented until recently as well, hopefully that doesn’t come back.

Ha, this is the way. I'm considering downgrading back to FO.

this is accurate. Tests have been run to see what a higher adg or a hard min day would look like in the optimizer and you would not like the results.

So... if ADG was, say, 20 hours, how bad is it really?

The 717 is the prime benefactor of a high ADG. The reason you guys have so much credit is because your average leg is a 1.6, and there's just not enough time in the day to get you up to an ADG. And scanning through the bid pack, I see literally 0 hard-time 4 or 5 days. A pure function of having a higher ADG for you guys. Think of what it would mean if you had an ADG of 3:00. You'd be flying 4-days that credit (and pay) 17 hours (or 12:29). 3 days that pay 13:30 (or 11:20). 2 days that pay 10:20. I'm just picking random ones out.

When you look at the "leftover" credit, though, you have very few rotations that exceed the trip length X ADG. i.e. almost no 3 days that credit more than 15:45, 4 days that credit more than 21:00, 5 days that credit more than 26:15. So in other words, you still need to work the same amount of days in a month to get to the LCW. When you do have something that credits more than a standard ADG/day, it's measured in minutes, which makes it very difficult to come up with a remainder that gets you less days of work in a month.

The number that is most important is (block hour limit - ADG). When that number is large, pilots win. When that number is small, the company wins. If our ADG was 7 hours, then when we're playing the plinko game of rotation construction, we win when the ball lands between 0:00 and 7:00, and the company wins when it lands between 7:01 and 9:00. The smaller that window becomes the more often we win.

Another way to approach this is to consider what the company would want. Do you think they'd be more inclined to increase or decrease the ADG? Honestly.

That is an interesting consideration across the system, however, thinking about what will happen when those short 1.3s wind up falling to other aircraft. It gives more opportunity to sharp shoot, but we'll probably also wind up reducing service to a lot of those places since we'd be flying lots of empty airplanes.

I don’t know that one

ADGs of 7:00 = 0500 shows and 2300 releases. Kiss commuting goodbye. Maybe to some that’s ok. Me, I’m happy with 5:15. Offers way more flexibility.

You could also kiss 30 hour layovers goodbye. Probably end up with more of a system like soithwest where you have trips with either all early mornings or all late nights.

The question is at what point is an ADG high enough that the company can’t realistically match block time to? Trips that have a high block every single day are also going to have long duty days. Those types of trips are going to fall apart even more than our current ones due to any hiccups - wx, mx, fatigue, etc. There has to be a practical limit where a certain block/day average becomes operationally infeasible.

If you say so.

I'm certainly not going to die an an ADG hill, or even proport that ADG should be increased/decreased.

But I'm reading here a lot of "ADG less is bad" and "ADG more is bad" supported by anecdotal (at best) assumptions. That's why I tossed out ADG of 20/day. Of course that would be unreasonable. But what would it look like?

I'll finish by admitting that I have no idea what changing ADG would look like in the grand scheme. And I'm hesitant to support something that I don't understand. So I'd leave ADG alone unless my union provides a more insightful perspective on this particular highly complex topic.

Yeah everyone should get paid less to keep trips commutable!

ANC-ATL says "hold my beer".....

unimaginably bad?
impractically bad?
unrealistically bad?
impossibly bad?
nevergonnabethisway bad?

for a taste of life without 5;15 adg consider the nyc-LHR/lgw/dub/man/snn/kef never rose above about 13:00 for a 3-day trip. Some as low as 11:40 for 3-days. When adg kicked in those all paid 15:45 overnight. Pretty great! But guess how that extra credit got funded: nb lines got waaaay more productive. Usually with penalty laps on the last day instead of ord/cmh/tpa/etc-atl and done. Qol for some deteriorated while it dramatically improved for others. However since part of the trade off in that contract was tighter scope language most of us welcomed the change in order to bring more rj guys up to mainline status and pay. Kinda nice that those pilots thought ahead like that eh?