In the latest Approach podcast released this week, RG mentions how they've seen excessive open time due to "pilot behavior", schedule manipulation or otherwise, and they're trying to get back to "pre-November" levels. However, my observation is that scheduling is increasingly chopping up leftover bid packet trips to use 3, 4, 5 or more pilots to cover trips that one of those pilots would have been eligible to cover in its entirety. My question is, are these artificially created broken trip numbers being incorrectly counted towards the pilot behavior metric that RG is communicating to management?

 

Easy, don't trust anything that comes out of the gumsters mouth. I think the big change in pilot behavior happed around the march time frame which was induced by an email from him.

 

It's not hard to believe the excessive open time part, which likely took off last fall, after everyone figured out there was free money to he had by clearing your schedule. Agreed that the pb day thing drastically changed pilot behavior. RG isn't drilling down far enough, or at least is purposely avoiding it.

 

This is the way

 

He sure does a lot of whining. He acts as if working with the pilot group is as hopeless as trying to change the weather by yelling at it​​​​. Um it's not that hard to get us to change our behavior... it just will take a little bit of the obscene profits we make. Heck, a lot of that will come out of the blown up 23M7 budget.

It's not that difficult, but we ain't Endeavor. Luckily, you have a much bigger budget to work with...
​​​​​

 

Schedule clearing hasn’t changed, the number of pilots around to staff the increase in demand has. WE didn’t make the choice to not hire 1700 pilots last year. The gummster fire manager did. Our rules didn’t change they foolishly and recklessly ignored the potential consequences of blatant mismanagement. Stable approach criteria can be applied to more aspects of this industry then just flying.

 

I agree with most of your post, but your first sentence just isn't true. There are more people today playing that game because they're comfortable in the fact that they'll still have a good month. I've been playing this game for years and pretty much know who above me do/do not play the game. (Even in my new cateogry). That number has increased since last fall. I'd wager that when the free money ends and QS dies off, many of these guys won't continue the game.

 

The problem is the company is in a vicious cycle of their own making. It took a long time to slowly work into the situation they've got today, and it's going to take a long time to dig out. In fact I'm not even sure they can dig out without PWA modifications via our next contract. It used to be that outside of a small percentage of credit surfers near the top of each category, most people flew pretty close to their PBS-awarded line, then the hustlers grabbed some premium and/or WS trips to boost their pay. Reserves covered the bigger trips 1-2 days out, and credit surfers snagged most of the last-minute stuff via WS. That dynamic is just straight up gone. It does start with staffing, as we don't have enough reserves in numerous categories to cover stuff even 2 days out. The company tries to entice people to fly bid packet trips via SS and GS, but many times those go unfilled, which then requires breaking trips up. In the ATL 717B category there are almost no pilots picking up any trips via WS (PCS or ARCOS) since that eats up your chances at 23m7. Generally you can't PD anything, but a lot of people are able to swap out of longer trips later in the month for shorter trips close in. That just compounds the issue as those long bid packet trips have to get broken up. As others have said, simply increasing the number of reserves won't help as much since that just allows more people to drop bid packet trips into OT. Everyone is only picking up premium flying. Somehow the company has to start to cut back on the free flow of premium pay. We're in a deep stall when it comes to staffing, and it's going to take a big pushover to restore clean, level flight. I think at this point you'd have to overstaff a category to a large degree in order to truly break the cycle, and I don't think the company is willing to hire enough to actually make that happen. We'll hire enough to stabilize the operation as far as cutting way back on our cancellations, but I don't see how they significantly cut back on premium flying in the next two years, barring some sort of black swan demand crash due to the Iran war.

 

Can't swap if they designate every trip as silver! Big brain scheduling.

 

Kinda surprised we haven't seen a comm out after the Special MEC meeting.. I thought they would at least said something.

I'm going with we're not getting a quick deal now. The timing won't work for fixing the summer (it wouldn't really be in effect until August 1st with getting info out, voting window, etc) By then, the bulk of the summer is done.