I'd like to hear others' stories of waste being observed on the line at XJT. I think it would be intersting to see what others have seen.

For example, last week. Our deadhead flight was about 3 hours late. We were to operate another turn after, which would have ran about a hour late. So in their wisdom, they pulled us off the turn, replaced it with a reserve crew they had to deadhead in from ATL, while we sat in DTW and did nothing for almost 4 hours instead of operating that turn. Makes no sense! Why not take the hour delay and not waste 2 crews plus the cost to deadhead!? Makes my head spin

 

I think that happens at a lot of carriers lol

 

I'm sure it does, but thats just a small examle of what I've been hearing. I want to hear what others are seeing. It seems to happen too much here though. Gee I wonder why we are loosing money? Oh wait, its our fault! How silly of me.

 

I don't know if you have it on the L-ASA side, but a few months ago we on the L-XJT side started a new volunteer union group specifically to report and monitor poor operations decisions or events as you described. How many airlines have operations that go so sideways so regularly that the pilots feel it is in their own best interest to dedicate part of their union manpower to monitor just how bad it goes?

 

I'm going to be honest. Assuming they judged staffing to be sufficient this sounds like a logical decision in the best interest of the customers. If they can keep those flights (and possibly additional later ones) on time, shouldn't they try to do so? Our performance numbers need all the help they can get. Unless over guarantee the reserve crew is little to no additional cost.

 

Envoys pretty bad, except our union is engaging recruitment and logbook services to facilitate career growth to all current pilots. We lack the ability to work with management on such a program as you described.

 

Who cares??? Really. Mesa and Skywest have all the orders. The place is toast. Done. Finished. End of Story.

 

Oh god, as a person who has bid reserve (even when able to hold a hard line) for 3 years at Eagle, I've seen some of the worst and most useless utilization of pilots before.

My personal favorite: I am called to do a ORD-ROC turn. No biggie. Show up, do my stuff, pax are boarding, near the end another FO pops his head up and says he is the original FO - his flight got in earlier and he wanted to pick up the rest of his flying. But CS would not put him on the outbound leg, just the return. So he was going to dead-head there while I flew, and he was going to fly back while I dead-headed. We called CS and said why not put him on both legs "We don't want to take a delay". Best part? Both legs were oversold and they had to buy passengers off at $500/pop.

When the system gets screwed up due to wx, they have so many guys deadheading around that they run out of pilots quicker because so many are needlessly deadheading around.

 

Good point. But what about the cost to deadhead? And in our current financial situation, wouldn't they rather take an hour delay then waste money and resourses? Just makes more sense to me

 

If you don't care, why post a response in this thread?