Agreed, except for something to add on the last sentence. Cover, yes. Get rid of 23M7 payments, no. A trip pops up inside 18 hours, it still will cause a 23m7 payment even if you hire a million pilots. In fact it will make it worse because you will have more pilots on the payroll to put auto accept in and it will take longer to get through that step of coverage. It’s just math.

The coverage ladder is going to have to change or auto accept will have to change

 

Believe me, I'm the last person that wants to see a head on a spike over this. But I'm positive that the question that you just asked is precisely the same question being asked in the C-suite.

 

...and why would so many trips be popping up inside 18 hours? Is there a known historical amount that has changed for some reason? Like an MD-88 with the APU on MEL, it will run a little hot and if not corrected quickly it takes and enormous amount of time and effort to bring it back under control. Fortunately there is the classic solution, throw money at the problem. You attack from several angles like APU maintenance, diligence hooking up ground air, upgrading ground air, keeping kinks out of the hose, leaving the APUs running that do run, closing the shades, pulling jets offline and using another fleet etc.

What you don't do is send out the APU sheriff out on the ramp with a clipboard to check off:

<APU running> N *good job (10 attaboy point awarded to the crew)

 

I agree, it will have to. I don't think it's the reason for cancellations but it is not a great system even for us pilots. We have the upper hand and it'll be up to them to pay for their self induced mistakes we warned them about. Maybe undo some of the crap they've been pulling lately.

If they weren't so adversarial this could've been mutually solved a long time ago.

 

People get sick, planes break, wx happens. A lot of things happen inside 18 hours

I don’t have the data on historical norms of trips popping up on open time <18 hours, do you?

 

Just anecdotally... It never used to be a problem. The reinterpretation of 23M7 management thought they had scored with was the fatal flaw. Then they refused to hire or have any self control on batches so a contributing factor was greed, management greed. If 23M7 was never exploited, then none of this would have happened and hiring would have continued at appropriate levels. I know there is data on the GS explosion a few years ago prior to all this. That points to staffing.

 

seriously? SK for one. And plenty of others. Like probably the entire skeds committee. Some of them might even have been lurking or posting on these pages. It wasn’t rocket surgery to think ahead with nuance what ARCOS implementation would bring. The batch size giveaway just confirmed that some high ranking ALPA reps had no idea what they were dealing with at the time.

sorta related: we should include the extra 24(!) hours of trip coverage flexibility we just gave the co in the last contract as another milestone on the road to lighting our current gummster bonfire of vanity. 24 extra hours: that is DOUBLE what they had for decades and still we get calls at 2:45 am for a morning push just because mgt wants to try and cheapen the cost of our labor. No thanks, use the existing tools properly before blaming us for this disaster.

 

Wasn't it the MEC Chairman that gave away batch sizes? I see this anger directed towards the company re: batch sizes, but DH gave it up.

 

Please show me any communication from SK or any skeds committee that mentions the threat of the ARCOS system breaking down if too many pilots put in auto accepts.

 

Sounds like you want to change the 18 hr Long call. When we used to have 12hr long call, none of this things happened. It wasn’t because of the long call time, it was because we were properly staffed and scheduling wasn’t playing games with reserves.

I like 18hr long calls. And we didn’t had that issue when we started doing them 2 years ago. Company is at fault…they have the power to fix it…but if is not by next week, this will just keep happening until the contract its ratified or they hire 3,000 pilots.