A comprehensive interview with the Chief...


Airline Business Interview - Richard Anderson - Delta Air Lines

They need so many more crew trackers during these times. I think schedulers should be dual trained to make the transition over to tracking. The issue seems to be crazy reroutes being put out by a computer that doesn't pass the common sense test. When it is obvious nonsense, tracking can't be reached to give a better alternative. Crazy thing is, it is costing the company major coin when a much simpler and cheaper solution is available. We should be able to Positive space DH list during times like these as well. We could do some of the work that takes 1 hr. of our time holding on the phone, clogging up the phone lines, only to take the valuable time of someone working on the bigger picture. I've never seen the operation in this much turmoil, except for 9/11. In defense of our guys, when a city grinds to a halt and people can't make it to work, carnage follows.

what if they trained pilots as backup trackers? when the system crashes in ATL call the backups in SLC and LAX to perform those functions and pay them.

No.

If you acknowledged the SC then you had no obligation to check your schedule or ack the trip. They would have put the trip on your schedule and called to notify you of the trip when your SC started at noon. I always ack legal SC assignments then never ack a trip they throw on there early or the SC credit will disappear.

If you did not ack the SC then they can pull it off and put a trip on your schedule. In this case it looks like that is what happened. Since you did not ack the trip prior to 10 hours before report you were illegal to fly the trip. The contract only required you to ack the trip 3 hours prior to report in this case. SD's memo requires you to have your phone on all night and answer any call to ack a trip at any time on LC. So you should have left your phone on so they could wake you up in the middle of the night to ack the trip.

You left out one key fact - did you acknowledge the short call when you checked your schedule on your last no-fly day?


It really doesn't matter though as far as your question is concerned. Your situation is the heart of the current dispute over the contract language and the new FAR 117.


You better check your schedule and your time card to see if they hit you with a personal drop and docked your paycheck.

According to the document we thought was the contract you did not have to answer the 12:15 am phone call. You could have slept peacefully and checked your messages when you got up, just as you did, and then acknowledged the trip at that time or any time up to 3 hours from report.

According to Steve Dickson you did have to answer. Or at least check your messages at 2 AM. You were on long call from midnight to 2AM. Under his version of the contract you have to acknowledge at least 10 hours prior to sign-in.
If you didn't have short call the next day or if you haven't acknowledged it and you are just on long call, then Dickson's copy of the contract says you have to either leave your phone on and answer it or you have to check your messages every two hours all night long.

ALPA says they are defending the contract as written but they haven't provided any updates on whether they have been able to get anybody's pay restored. Management seems to be winning.

Sounds like we need to assemble another tiger team!!!

I don't care. I would WRECK that chick.

I did acknowledge the short call on my last non fly day. That's why I was under the assumption I didn't need to answer my phone until noon the next day. They could've given me the trip legally if they would've waited until noon to assign it to me. They ended up giving it to someone else at 0620 that morning. I checked my schedule and time card. They did not dock my pay.

I'm not sure any of us can say who is winning. I've had one SC dropped (tried to give me a 10AM on day one) and one LC trip dropped. In both cases they just dropped them and put me back on reserve. No PD's and no docked pay. I was told by ALPA that this is what is happening in most cases. I do know 2 guys who have had PD's placed on their schedules and had a visit to the CP office. They will be included in a group grievance over the issue.

I think this will take a long time to figure out who wins. The only way we are going to win is to stick to the contract that both parties signed and agreed to. If we just go along with the SD memo then they will absolutely win.

The OP's case doesn't seem to be about any of that though. If he acknowledged the noon SC, then he would have been completely legal to do the 14:30ish trip. They may have called after midnight but they didn't have to, and he didn't have to answer. As far as he knew, he had SC at noon so that's when the phone comes on. Even if they tried to stick it to him with the SD fantasy 2 hour leash memo, that had nothing to do with anything, as he still had over 2 hours had they just waited til start of SC to call again.

The only things I can think of is that they either just reflexively "pumped and dumped" the trip because they were in "fantasy memo mode" or they were trying to get an earlier acknowledgement because they wanted or needed a long duty day and wanted report to start at 14:30 instead of off a noon RAP.