Trips are simply a combination of airplane RONs and round trips. There is a ratio between the two. If there was no RONs, we would only have day trips. The RONs require the company to build multi day trips. We used to have lines of only high speeds(high speed is a RON). They stop building the high speed lines and high speeds are rare now.

No high speeds means they pack those RONs into trips and is why the one days trips went away and we mostly have four days, it's the ratio between round trips and RONs.

It's not rocket science and ALPA building pairings is not going to change much. The flying we get assigned by AA is what mostly dictates our trip efficiency. ALPA building trips and work rule improvements might have a small impact and improvement in efficiency but it's not going to significantly change anything like some people on here are claiming.

The only way to guarantee more 1-3 day trips is contractual language requiring the company to build and maintain a specified ratio of those trips, something I doubt our union is pushing for.

 

how will it be or should I say how is it in the majors or Legacy lines with trips and scheduling? Isn’t that where everyone wants to be ultimately?

 

I would agree with you that ALPA building trips is probably not going to move the needle a huge amount, unless the Crew Planning department is really as inept as certain comments on compass cards would make it seem. Having spent a fair amount of time in Jim S's office, he's smarter than a lot of people give him credit for.

What I am interested to see is how having a new VP of Planning and Efficency (or whatever his title is) affects us before ALPA gets their hands on the pairing generator.

 

Schedules are generally "better" at the majors, but it's really variable by base, season and fleet. There is the same tension between building schedules that are commute friendly vs. live-in-base friendly.

 

One issue we can all agree upon, the number one factor that leads to inefficiencies is the system we use to split up trips for conflicts. This has nothing to do with the trips that are built by the pairing generator.

We don't have to adapt PBS in order to eliminate the process of splitting trips. Personally, I'd like to keep line bidding the way it is with the exception of split trips for conflicts.

I'd like to see the trip dropped off your schedule completely if it conflicts with training or vacation. The split trip problem gets solved and open time would look a lot better in SAP and all month long.

 

Probably because of the longer legs. We mostly average three to four legs a day and complain when we have five. I hear mainline mostly does one and two leg days and they complain when they have three.

 

Yeah, well I’ll go ahead and save you the suspense and tell you that’s not going to happen.

There is a different option in a PBS world you haven’t considered thorough. I’ll see if you can figure it out.

There is more than one way to skin this cat.


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Comparing a regionals trips and schedules to a Majors is apples and oranges based on the average stage length of legs and different fleets. CRJs aren't doing Transcons out of CLT...


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Sorry, Tallflyer
A lot of times when people sap is because Jim s builds crap 4 days. 4 days worth 16-14 hours of credit are screaming “drop me.” Thats also not to mention 4 days that are worth 10 hours. If you look at the opentime pot when sap closes, it’s nothing but crap. It cost more money to get to work.

Every other airline has 4 days that are worth a minimum of 20 hours. Maybe you can share some insight why these trips are build with such low credit? Are we blaming the wrong guy? I can tell you as a line pilot everyone dislikes him. Maybe people including myself wouldn’t sap as much if trips were actually worth something.

 

Those airlines still have 13-17 block hour four days. They just have real work rules so the 13 block four day pays a minimum of 20 credit. You can't fix the low block problem but you can add a minimum amount of pay credit for each day or average day for the trip along with duty and trip rigs. Simply eliminating the carveouts on our current min day and nothing else would have marginal improvements at best.