Airline Pilot Central Forums - Any "Latest & Greatest" about Delta?

There has been a lot of very bad information and analysis here regarding the new contract and scheduling changes. If you want a more detailed and lengthy explanation of what was behind the changes then read on. If you just want to attack with one liners or sentence by sentence deconstructions, then ignore this post as you will be unhappy reading it.

First, our scheduling system was designed for reserves to work 12-14 duty periods per month and fly 60 hours. Also, a reserve pilot should expect to sit 4-5 short calls per month on average. This was not designed for people like me that choose to commute, so a short call day where you aren't called is not a duty day. If you want a reserve system designed for commuters, then you are going to have to change the rest of the pilot group's mind because that was not a priority on the contract survey.

Second, the definition of Total Pilot Hours or TP Hours. That is the sum of block + credit + vacation + training + known absences for a month. That is what drives the total pilot needs for scheduling purposes and determines the ALV for the month. The ALV is meant to vary to cover differences in TP hours from month to month. Below is a table that shows, with a fixed number of pilots, how varying the ALV from top of range to bottom of range can cover differences from month to month. The differences are shown in percentages:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39382899/20...V%20Ranges.JPG

Third, the manning formula is a self correcting formula that mandates that at the maximum, reserves fly 60 hours per month on average or 720 a year. This is the manning formula:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39382899/20...%20Formula.JPG

If you want to quarrel with that FACT, then you need to show some mathematical way to get around the hard and fast numbers that are embedded in that formula. Show your proof.

Below is a complicated table, I apologize for the complexity but I was trying to tie several concepts together to show how they interact and this is what I came up with.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39382899/20...TP%20Hours.JPG

The first column labeled TP Old show an amalgam of historical averages and future projections for TP Hours that are used for planning. Rather than show the large numbers, I normalized the series to the lowest month, January. You see that as represented by 1 or 100%. July and August are the peaks that are about 16% above the minimum. If you note the the ALV table above, an ALV range of 72-82 (the old contract) could only cover a range of 14%. What that meant was that the company overstaffed to have the right amount of regular and reserve pilots for the peak months and then you had 300 or so extra reserve pilots sitting around the rest of the year. That is why guys got used to having low months in the winter.

The next column, TP New, shows the effects of shifting the bid periods that will occur starting next month. By moving a day from July to April and from August to September, you depeaked those months to 12-13% above average rather than 16%. Technically, that range could be covered by the old 72-82 range, but individual categories, mostly international, have larger swings and that is why the ALV range was changed to an upper limit of 84.

That was the major staffing concession in this contract. Instead of having a right sized airline for three months and then an overstaffed airline for 9, the company should be able to level out the staffing and reserves should fly the same amount from month to month. Note, the ALV+15 piece was a minor, minor piece that affected staffing only to the smallest degree. This has become a lightning rod on this forum but it is not a major change. Why?

Look at the third column over, Old Res, it shows that if you have a level reserve staffing, and you assume that reserve coverage will track the variations in TP hours per month, how average reserve hours will vary during the year in order to reach the minimum staffing total of 720. You see the average go from 56 to 65 under the old system. In fact it varied much more than that because for the lean months, we were actually overstaffed by an additional 300 pilots that were only needed for regular line flying for June-August.

The next column, New Res, shows the same calculation but with the changes to the bid periods reflected. You will see that rather than exaggerating the effects of summer, it actually decreases the seasonal variations. Once again, you have to average 720 for the year, it is not optional it is math.

The next column over shows the SYSTEM average ALV to maintain level staffing under the new bid period system. Next to it the column labeled Reality shows the SYSTEM average reserve guarantee that matches up with the ALV shown. At the bottom you see that on average a reserve would get 904 hours of guarantee.

The last column, labeled Doomsday, shows what some of the most concerned here are contemplating. Here I just assume that using the ALV + 15 scenario, pilots will average 90 hours per month in the summer. Note that reserve pilots get the HIGHER of block + credit or guarantee, so flying extra in the summer does not decrease reserve pay in other months, even if pilots don't turn a wheel. Note that under the Doomsday scenario, the company actually has to pay more hours to each pilot, costing them millions and millions.

If someone was going to try to justify this scenario, they would have to provide a logical scenario as to why reserve flying would vary by 70-90% in the high months when the load required, TP Hours, only varied by 12-13%. That math just doesn't add up. The larger variation that you have seen in the past from winter to summer only reflects the fact that the winter months have been grossly overstaffed due to the inefficiencies in the system.

So why did the company want ALV+15. Simply because circumstances vary. If you are going to AVERAGE 60 hours per PILOT, then some will be higher and some lower. We all know the variations in weather, x-days, sick calls, etc. so sometimes they need someone to go higher while others will have a short month flying wise. Also, we have some longer Asia trips, that were illegal for any reserve pilot to cover ever. That made little sense.

So why were there any concessions at all? First it is a negotiation and not a hostage taking. If you think that walking into a room saying give me give me while telling the other party to go f themselves when they talk about their problems, you will get a raise sometime before the twelfth of never. Second, there are tradeoffs made in the contract all the time, why a max of 5 weeks of vacation and not 20? The MEC was given the option to accept management's strong desire to move out of the basement in productivity in exchange for other contractual benefits including pay, reserve guarantee and many others. They chose to accept that option. In a competitive time, the MEC had to choose whether to carry extra pilots for nine months a year was really the best use of their resources, resources that have and always will have an upper limit.

So the angst over the ALV + 15 is quite misguided. Rather than having some large effect on staffing, it will be quite small. The bid period smoothing was the big enchilada and you hardly hear anyone ever talk about it.

If you want something to talk about, you might want to consider that while the average will be greatly lower, there will be A SMALL number of pilots that exceed the ALV in any given month. The question would be, how to ensure that the same guys don't get hit months in a row. Maybe you should consider trying to change the RAW system so that hours/duty periods over the ALV in a month carry over to the next month, so that someone that got hit in June, doesn't get hit again in July. That would probably be a better use of your time.