Here you go just what you were asking for!!!!! When all this stuff finally gets taken care of, everyone owes a big thanks to CAPA. Alpa has done very little to get jumpseats restored and CAPA has taken the lead on getting OUR seats back. Just a little note for all the commercial guys giving the cargo guys a hard time for not recipricating, UPS is the mainstay of CAPA and is one of the hardest fighters to restore the jumpseats.
OFFLINE COCKPITS
Five jumpseat coordinators
(NWA, CAL, AMWEST,
SWA, AAL) visited with
members of the Transportation
Safety Administration, the
FAA, and other airline managment
personnel this month
to clarify some confusion
about the FAA directive issued
in September.
The original intent of the
directive was never to require
“high tech” verification to
allow jumpseaters back in a
cockpit—in fact, a simple
phone call is sufficient verifi-cation.
However, initially,
Jumpseat Coordinators were
told that we had to come up
with some sort of high-tech,
computer-based, data-sharing
system. We worked on that
aspect from September until
March 2002. That’s when
FAA’s Tom Penland informed
us that we didn’t need to
develop such a high tech solu-tion.
The Jumpseat group that
met in Washington last month
picked apart FAR 121.547
“admission into the cockpit.”
They also worked on writing a
“legal interpretation” of FAR
121.547, as well as a re-write
of the currently obsolete
Security Directive. This
“legal interpretation” will then
be given to all P.O.I.s for the
airlines, as well as the TSA.
TSA will then hopefully have
the guidance, background, and
knowledge, to accept and
endorse this re-write of the
Security Directive.
The FAA will then give the
POIs and their airlines one
standardized set of guidelines
regarding cockpit jumpseats
and usage, which will leave no
room for any separate “inter-pretations”.
The question now: ‘Will
individual airlines agree to use
their agents to make the phone
call required to verify a pilot’s
employment?”
Alaska Airlines and their
code-share partner, Northwest
Airlines, have a phone system
in place to allow their pilots in
each other’s cockpits, as do
Comair/Delta, CAL/CALEX,
etc. All the FAA and TSA
require is a phone call
between the two, or actually
being able to verify one’s
employment in the computer.
What Management decides to
use, if they want pilots to get
to work, is up to the individual
airline.
We are watching as other
code-shares follow suit. As
for UPS, the immediate plan is
to share the newly developed
database with Fedex and
Southwest, for starters.
However, this progress is
dependent on whether FDX
and SWA updates their data-bases
to be compatible with
UPS’. Stay tuned!
