DCA aircraft and life
 

By next spring I’ll be ready to apply to regionals. I’m very interested in PSA and Republic. I live in Maryland and want to have DCA as my base. My question is what aircraft do they have at PSA in DCA? What’s schedules and life like at DCA? Any idea about upgrade times?
Thanks!

DCA aircraft and life
 

The only aircraft PSA flies CRJs...


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I should of been a little clearer. Which model CRJ do they fly at DCA?

All three see turns out of DCA, but I’ll let some of the experience DCAers answer ya question on the lines and schedule out of DCA though.


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DCA is pretty junior for FO and captain. Most guys who want it get based in DCA a few weeks to a month after finishing IOE. The most junior FO to hold a full line RD1 for this coming April was a July 2017 new hire.

DCA is most CRJ 700 Flying with a mix of 200 and 900 Trips.

Out of the 60 RD1 lines for April, I would say maybe 10 lines were 90%ish commutable for the most part. I define comutable as day 1 starting around 12ish and ending around 1800ish on day 4.

Everything you said is music to my ears. I live an hour and ten mins from the airport. No commuting sounds wonderful. Let me ask you and please forgive my ignorance but is it a different type rating for the different models of CRJ’s? Or is it one type you’re good for all three models? Also, how’s the reserve? Being so close could I wait at home while on reserve?

Reserve is hell and reserve here at PSA is a special kind of hell.

My 19 months of reseve (@ 2 different airlines) have all been commuting to reserve, However you living in base will make it 50% better. If you can be sitting on your couch at home and make it to the plane in 2 hours, life will be pretty good. Short call reserve SCR is a 2 hour callout window and Long Call reserve LCR is a 12 hour callout window.

With that said our union is currently in negotiations with management for a major reserve contract “improvements”. So we shall be hearing about that early summer if not sooner.

CL 65 covers all three CRJ 200 700 900

The company is currently senior manning upgrades. Soo essentially as soon as you have your 1000 SIC 121 time you can upgrade.

CL-65 covers all the 200, 700, and 900s. When you get to training, your class will be split to train on 200s or the 700/900s initially then receive differences training on the opposite aircraft. But now it seems they are going to send everyone down the 200 training pipeline due to the backlog on the 700/900 side.


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Many of the DCA lines are commutable. Many aren’t though as well. From what I’ve noticed it seems like if you are willing to accept trips that aren’t 20+ hours of credit you can make a schedule with the SAP that is almost totally commutable in DCA. Although you likely won’t have many 23 and 24 hour commutable 4 days. It’s easier to commute if you can avoid trips that begin and end on the weekend.

I just want to highlight the fact that 99% of the time you're assigned hot reserve, you're not "netting" extra pay. Nets the same as sitting at home under the two hour call out unless you end up breaking guarantee. Most pilots average 3-4 days of hot per month and never break guarantee unless they pickup flying on days off.

If you credit just under 75 hours on reserve, you worked really hard that month and you probably would of credited north of 100 if hot reserve went on top of guarantee and deadhead pay was industry standard 100% instead of our Mesa bottom of the barrel 50%.

They're actually 62.5%. Don't let the door hit you on the way out chasing that awesome DH pay.

Why you so angry in everything you post? Have a kale smoothy and you'll feel better.

I really don't care so much about the 1/2 DH pay, it is what it is and a result of tough past negotiations and the state of the industry average from 2009-2012. I think we still have the best contract in the regional industry because of our SAP. No one else has a SAP like ours.

Awesome. Thanks everyone for your responses. I have a better idea now of what to expect.

Any new(er) FO at DCA mind sharing there schedule?

First 20 DCA lines. That said, after SAP they can be VERY different.

https://i.imgur.com/2dBEyPx.png

Expect 95%+ of the trips initially built into lines to be 4-days. PSA hates pilots who live in domicile.

Nothing to do with hate, and everything to do with how they feel they can be more efficient. Its something I want to dig into.

Is it typical to not start at DCA? It appears they all require commuting somewhere to start the work trip. Or am I reading the Shedule wrong?

The codes you see on the schedule are scheduled over nights, there are links on the schedule that you'll be able to click to see your scheduled pairings for that particular day. Someone will have to share that with ya, but you'll be able to see it once you have access to FLICA. I am sure all of DCA trips start and end in DCA. Only pairings that have Dead Heads on the start and end of trips are usually on out station base lines


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I just got a round 2 in DCA. 9 months and probably would take a few more to get round 1.

Please do. I'm really curious how 4 hotel rooms and per diem is cheaper or more efficient than splitting a trip when it gets back to an outstation base.

I understand this is a lower priority because so many commute, but those who choose to live in domicile never spend a dollar of the commuter hotel money, or call out using the commuter policy. Meanwhile they are slogging through commuter-grade trips because the company won't build a variety of trips.

The company may not "hate" pilots who live in domicile, but their policies certainly seem to "prefer" pilots who do not.

It's a huge quality of life issue for pilots who live in domicile, that would take very little effort on the company's part to correct. PSA used to have a number of 1,2, and 3-day trips...even as recently as a year ago.

A couple people have commented on this. For a outsider looking in I’m a bit confused. Could someone shed some light on what exactly is happening? I plan on coming here and living in base. What is the problem with the lines?

Quite simply, lines consisting of only 4-day trips will require a pilot to be away from home between around 320 and 400 hours a month. If some lines were built with 1-3 day trips, the total amount of time a pilot would have to be away from home in a month would drop, and could be below 200 hours a month (if the line consisted completely of one and two day trips).

If you're single, no kids, and have no life where you live, then 4-day trips are fine. If you have to get on an airplane to commute to work because you don't live in your home base, 4-day trips are great, because they reduce the hassle of commuting.

If you have a family, a home, a business that allows you to work for what PSA pays, or other reasons to be at home, 4-day trips are sub-optimal. You'd likely prefer to come to work in the morning, and go home in the late afternoon, spending your night in your home with your family, like normal people.

Some people focus on how many days off they get, but I don't think that's the ideal metric. The ideal metric, in my opinion, is time away from base, and that amount should be the minimum possible.

From this viewpoint, four 1-day trips are far preferable to one 4-day trip. A 4-day trip will run around 84 hours away from base, for about 20 hours of pay. Four 1-day trips could run 40 hours or less away from base, for that same 20 hours of pay.

Even two 2-day trips will run about 70 hours away from base, with 20 hours of pay...and they'll allow someone who lives in domicile a night at home with their family.

We used to have a variety of these trips at PSA. For a while now, we haven't, because the company quit building them. You can occasionally pick up or trade into a trip that is shorter than four days in length, but that's because the original 4-day trip the company built got broken up for training, vacation, etc.

These shorter trips will disappear completely if the company gets their wish with PBS, and they continue to only build 4-day trips to begin with.

So, if you live where you are based, would you rather be at work 200 hours a month, or 400? You'll get paid the same, regardless.

That's a whole lot of what ifs and maybes, especially considering that the majority of the pilot group commutes. If you're a commuter lots of shorter trips could be less than ideal, especially if either end is non commutable.

And in case you haven't been paying attention, building trips is a separate function than PBS. PBS is just a different way of building a line vs line bidding, then having to SAP the crap out of it. PBS does not build trips.

I am aware of how PBS works. We've both used it elsewhere. Garbage in, garbage out.

Because they only build 4-day trips, and PBS works to eliminate conflicts in the line it builds, there won't be the broken-up, formerly 4-day trips from which to trade into.

And there is no "if" when it comes to the math of spending time in hotel rooms, vs. spending time at home.

Got it. Thanks for the breakdown.

[QUOTE=irrelevant;2561819]I am aware of how PBS works. We've both used it elsewhere. Garbage in, garbage out.

Because they only build 4-day trips, and PBS works to eliminate conflicts in the line it builds, there won't be the broken-up, formerly 4-day trips from which to trade into.[/ALPA]
Which is why a necessary component of PBS will be ALPA involvement in building trips, and a equitable way of picking who's solution to use.

BTW, those "formerly 4-day trips" are a large reason why reservists get used and abused, because post SAP all that's left are little crappy pieces.

Agreed. But you also signed up to be an airline pilot.

I agree some of the broken trips that are non-productive will be eliminated with PBS.

As for being away from home being part of being an airline pilot, I did just fine as an airline pilot when I flew 1-day trips, credited 85 hours or so per month, and was away from home less than 200 hours a month. Just because PSA's schedule-building favors being away from home 400 hours a month, doesn't mean that's the way it is everywhere, or the way it always is.

Should we expect our representatives to trade away the limit on trip length from 4 days, to 6 now, just because we're airline pilots?

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.