Another condescending SH email.

[IBNAV8R]

Don't know much about ASA or SH or CT. I do know that BH still has a cozy little place high up on SKW's seniority list and probably free use of the houseboat for life. Doubt he'll be bagging groceries.

 

[blesko]

If he were falling on his sword, he would have admitted to staffing problems (the majority of the cancellations today) as being an issue.

We need to see some sort of plan here. Just asking for help is like a meth-head asking for directions to the rehab clinic they already know the way to. We have been begging for help for over a year now, and they have done nothing for us. Extra effort this week does nothing but prolong the agony, unless there is a plan in place and working.

And what the f*** difference would it make if they admit, yet again, they can't adequately manage the airline. Folks, culture starts from the top and if SH, CT and BH need to go, so be it. I said it. My wife is a phD candidate in mangement with an MBA from MIT and simply laughs at how easy this could be for the company to fix. We, the employees, for the most part, get it. We want a job to come to, work whats expected, and go home. Honest days work for an honest days pay. The things that are outside of our control, staffing, etc, are the things that seem to bury us, operationally. We're expected to work hard, at maybe, depending on how you see things, work hard, or harder than normal, and 99% of you were on this "Team Brad" bandwagon. Working hard is an ethic, which relies me to do my best to put my best foot forward to make a contribution to my company, my peers and my customers. The company's job is to give me the resources to do my job. I have yet to have seen this from them.

 

[jetstream]

Incompetence.

Enough said.

 

[Av8trix616]

How to keep someone with you forever:

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they've ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they've ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn't want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally?


You create a sick system.

A sick system has four basic rules:

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn't there. No energy, and your lover's dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can't turn off anyone's thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it's exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you're golden.

Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved. Make them love you if you can, or if you're a company, foster a company culture of extreme loyalty. Otherwise, tie their success to yours, so if you do well, they do well, and if you fail, they fail. If you're working in an industry where failure isn't a possibility (the government, utilities), establish a status system where workers do better or worse based on seniority. (This also works in bad relationships if you're polyamorous.)

Also note that if you set up a system in which personal loyalty and devotion are proof of your lover's worthiness as a person, you can make people love you. Or at least think they love you. In fact, any combination of intermittent rewards plus too much exhaustion to consider other alternatives will induce people to think they love you, even if they hate you as well.

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you'll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you'll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn't, you'll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there's a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It's the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people.

How do you do all this? It's incredibly easy:

Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you're guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week's production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.

Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you've mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.

But why wouldn't people eventually realize that the crises are a permanent state of affairs? Because you've explained them away with an explanation that gives them hope.

Things will be better when... I get a new job. I'm mean to you now because I'm so stressed, but I'm sure that will go away when I'm not working at this awful place.

The production schedule is crazy because the client is nuts. We just need to get through this cycle, then we'll have a new client, and they'll be much better.

She has a bad temper because she just started with a new therapist. She'll be better when she settles in.

Now, the first person isn't actually looking for a job. (They're too stressed to fill out applications.) The second industry always has another crazy client, because all the clients are crazy. (Or better yet, because the company is set up to destroy the workflow and make the client look crazy.) The third person has been with her “new” therapist for a year. (But not for three years! Or five!) But the explanation sounds plausible, and every now and then the person has a good day or a production cycle goes smoothly. Intermittent reinforcement + hope = “Someday it will always be like this.” Perpetual crises mean the person is too tired to notice that it has never been like this for long.

Keep real rewards distant. The rewards in “Things will be better when...” are usually nonrewards—things will go back to being what they should be when the magical thing happens. Real rewards—happiness, prosperity, career advancement, a new house, children—are far in the distance. They look like they're on the schedule, but there's nothing in the To Do column. For example, everything will be better when we move to our own house in the country... but there's nothing in savings for the house, no plan to save, no house picked out, not even a region of the country settled upon. Or everything will be better when she gets a new job, but she's not applying anywhere, she's not checking the classifieds, she has no skills that would get her a new job, she has no concrete plans to learn skills, and she doesn't know what type of new job she wants to take. Companies have a harder time holding out on rewards, but endlessly delayed raises and promotions, workplace upgrades that are talked about but never get enough budget, and training programs that are canceled for lack of money work well.

Establish one small semi-occasional success. This should be a daily task with a stake attached and a variable chance of success. For example, you need to take your meds at just the right time. Too early and you're logy the next morning and late to work, too late and you're insomniac and keep your partner up until you go to sleep, too anything and you develop nausea that interrupts your meal schedule and sets your precariously balanced blood sugar to swinging, sparking tantrums and weeping fits. It's your partner's job to get you to take your meds at just the right time. Each time she finds an ideal time, it becomes a point of contention—you're always busy at that time, or you're not at home, or you eat too early or too late so the ideal time shifts or vanishes entirely. But every so often you take your meds at just the right time and everything works perfectly, and then your partner gets a jolt of success and the hope that you've reached a turning point.

Chop up their time. Perpetually interrupt them with meetings, visits from supervisors, bells and whistles and time clocks and hourly deadlines. Or if you're partners, be glued to them at the hip, demand their attention at short intervals throughout the day (and make it clear that they aren't allowed to do the same with you), establish certain essential tasks that you won't do and then demand that they do them for you, establish certain essential tasks that they aren't allowed to do for themselves and demand that they rely on you to do it for them (and then do it slowly or badly or on your own schedule). Make sure they have barely enough time to manage both the crisis of the moment and the task of the moment; and if you can't tire them out physically, drain them emotionally.

Enmesh your success with theirs. Company towns are great at this. Everything, from the workers' personal social standing to the selection of groceries at the store, depends upon how well they do their jobs and how well the company as a whole is doing. Less enveloping companies try to tie their workers' self-perceptions in with the public's perception of their brand. People do it by entangling their successes and failures with their partners', even when they shouldn't be entangled. A full-grown adult should be able to take his meds without his partner's help, and there's only so much anyone can do to make someone eat at the right time and swallow their pills, but he still puts the responsibility for managing his meds squarely on her shoulders. The classic maneuver is to blame all your bad moods on your partner: If they weren't so _______ or if they did ______ right, you wouldn't be so stressed/angry/foul-tempered.

Keep everything on the edge. Make sure there's never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there's never enough ______ to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work on all six cylinders just to keep the system from collapsing.


Read the rest at:
http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

 

[Flyer1015]

Who is SH? And what regional is this? Do not assume people know what or who you are talking about. Based on previous post history, I venture a guess this is ASA-related, as a majority of ASA pilots on flightinfo have an entitlement complex that this forum belongs to them.

 

[Flyprdu]

Who is SH? And what regional is this? Do not assume people know what or who you are talking about. Based on previous post history, I venture a guess this is ASA-related, as a majority of ASA pilots on flightinfo have an entitlement complex that this forum belongs to them.

C'mon Flyer... you read FI daily. Even I am keenly aware of who SH is.

Anyone who is on this website as much as you are should be intimately aware and involved with the inner-workings of Atlantic Southeast Airlines.

 

[Cpt Oveur]

Who is SH? And what regional is this? Do not assume people know what or who you are talking about. Based on previous post history, I venture a guess this is ASA-related, as a majority of ASA pilots on flightinfo have an entitlement complex that this forum belongs to them.

No one at ASA has the b@lls to say this on the ALPA forum with this degree of candor. SH is the Director of Flight Operations.

 

[probablecause]

SH's message = Bawahahaha-Bawawahahahahahahahahahaha-Bawahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah! Good luck with that buddy....

 

[OCP]

It's 5 am in in ATL and 11 CNX due to crew.

 

[probablecause]

It's 5 am in in ATL and 11 CNX due to crew.

18 CNX. Those 19C codes are crew related I think.

 

[HoserASA]

I don't think it SH as much as CT is pulling the strings. SH is just the sh*t catcher on this. Whats done now cannot be fixed overnight, the cost savings really has come at to great a cost.

Bingo!

 

[Data]

I think Scott sent this email to the wrong group, perhaps he pressed 'All Pilots' when he meant to select 'All Management'.

 

[BoilerUP]

I seem to recall something a Pinnacle pilot wrote a few years ago:

The high cost of low overhead

 

[jetstream]

This is some very creative Writing. I like how he begins by laying much of the blame on the pilots and ends with telling us that we do a "great job".

I especially love the part where he says, "it doesn't matter how we got here". Oh, but I think it do matter.......

If there is a valid reason we have to run the airline understaffed right now, let us in on it. People are much more willing to suck it up and do what has to be done if they understand why.

If there is not a valid reason for running so short staffed then heads should roll.

 

[Poppa Hodax]

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think.

Rule 2: Keep them tired.

Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved.

Rule 4: Reward intermittently.

Interesting....sounds like SERE School.

 

[Stifler's Mom]

What exactly is he referring to when he says people aren't following the FOM??????

 

[Plainsman]

What exactly is he referring to when he says people aren't following the FOM??????

Sorry guys I left my wings in my bag the other day and forgot to put them on. The Walrus saw me when I was getting on the elevator, didn't like it very much. I never imagined that one little mistake on my part would have gotten this out of hand. So blame the fom part on me.

 

[SPDBRD747400]

This email comes from the man that allows pilots leave to do tv shows. Then blames us for taking personal leave. Uh why not just say NO!, oh wait then it would look like it was his fault and we are understaffed. SH is a complete waste of space!

 

[WWEfan]

My translation...

You pilots got us into this mess, but I will forgive you if you pull it together this weekend.

/puke

 

[Ted]

What exactly is he referring to when he says people aren't following the FOM??????

I'm thinking he is referring to guys not telling on themselves when their delay takes them below 9 hrs rest. Then their subsequent duty day is limited and they end up removing roundtrips. I can't blame guys for not calling when the wait times are 20+ minutes to get someone to answer the phone in scheduling. When they do answer, it is just a drone who has to go and wait in line for the one supervisor on duty who can actually do something. Who wants to do that on a reduced-rest overnight? If you fight them about being on duty until they actually talk to you on the phone, they will give you that bunk about being able to contact you for 1 hour on either end of a rest period. If they had proper staffing, there would be folks on reserve to cover this crap.

Fly safe guys!

 

[Abernathy]

I thought that new logo was supposed to fix all this.

 

[777forever]

I'm thinking he is referring to guys not telling on themselves when their delay takes them below 9 hrs rest. Then their subsequent duty day is limited and they end up removing roundtrips. I can't blame guys for not calling when the wait times are 20+ minutes to get someone to answer the phone in scheduling. When they do answer, it is just a drone who has to go and wait in line for the one supervisor on duty who can actually do something. Who wants to do that on a reduced-rest overnight? If you fight them about being on duty until they actually talk to you on the phone, they will give you that bunk about being able to contact you for 1 hour on either end of a rest period. If they had proper staffing, there would be folks on reserve to cover this crap.

Fly safe guys!

Since they offered 200% I called last night to pick up some open time for today. Was on hold for 42 minutes before I gave up. Only reason I waited that long is because I had it on speaker phone and was playing XBOX.

 

[Abernathy]

Since they offered 200% I called last night to pick up some open time for today. Was on hold for 42 minutes before I gave up. Only reason I waited that long is because I had it on speaker phone and was playing XBOX.

Why not just pick it up on skedplus

 

[JoeMerchant]

Why not just pick it up on skedplus

Can't pick up current open time on sched plus.

 

[flyboyike]

Comair had the same BS before its dive off the cliff.....

Had? The BS is still going on.

 

[Abernathy]

Mismanagement at its finest. We obviously want the company to survive but there is nothing we can do at our level. Our management team is among the most inept, embarrassing, and reckless among airline management and will likely be remembered historically for this 3 year-long screw up.

ASA is on shaky ground and we will absolutely go the way of Comair unless we can get better management. We have money to piss away millions to change our brand identity, but we can't hire a few more pilots and fix a few more airplanes.

Here's what's going to happen. ASA will make it through the summer, we will get a "Thanks for all you do" letter from BH and maybe a sloppily written e-mail from CT, we'll push through the winter still short staffed and getting boned from behind, and nothing will change.

Fly safe.

 

[Ted]

Mismanagement at its finest. We obviously want the company to survive but there is nothing we can do at our level. Our management team is among the most inept, embarrassing, and reckless among airline management and will likely be remembered historically for this 3 year-long screw up.

ASA is on shaky ground and we will absolutely go the way of Comair unless we can get better management. We have money to piss away millions to change our brand identity, but we can't hire a few more pilots and fix a few more airplanes.

Here's what's going to happen. ASA will make it through the summer, we will get a "Thanks for all you do" letter from BH and maybe a sloppily written e-mail from CT, we'll push through the winter still short staffed and getting boned from behind, and nothing will change.

Fly safe.

You are quite a bit more optimistic than me. I think ASA will flail through the summer while Delta and United are making other plans. Come fall one (or both) will start the process to revoke our contracts. All the while our management will be working on SOC stuff for an airline that does not exist anymore. Jerry needs to get over here and fix this NOW, or we're done.

 

[Abernathy]

I remember hearing many times that we cut staffing because one of Brad's biggest pet peeves is "reserves who don't fly."

He better quit whining and get over that real quick because it's that kind of mentality that has driven us to where we are.

 

[sinkrate]

The problem is Delta.

When I look in the back of my 50 seat AC and see three crews from three different DCI carriers all on a scheduled DH as part of the their trip - something is way wrong. In the red tail system DH's were very few in number - now just about every pairing has at least one scheduled DH in it.

When I report for the first flight in Regional City USA and see one AC each from five different DCI carriers at the gate - soemthing is very F'ed up. There is only one COEX and for the most part one Eagle.

Delta has hopelessly screwed up the integration of the red tail RJ's into the Delta system. They refuse to let any one carrier dominate even the smallest market so we are all spread ridiculously all over the country. Delta's marketing guru's have changed their marketing plan from one that you can staff with 5 crews per AC to one that needs 6 or 7 crews per AC. We used to need only two crews per day per AC. Now I see some schedules that require four crews a day to operate an AC. Two of those crews will be in the back of some one elses AC most of the day too. That is Delta's doing -and Delta's problem. They have the most expensive regional feed in the industry because of their marketing scheme. Yes I know it is because of their strike phobia - but they pay a tremendous price for it.

Our problem is Delta marketing has their heads too far up a dark place to realize they are the problem. PCL's and Mesaba's trips absolutely suck compared to the old red tail trips. The regional management group that realizes they need to staff 6 crews per AC to maintain good performance will be rewarded by Delta with a flogging for increasing expenses.

If you are in senior management at a DCI carrier you are in a no win position. It doesn't matter what they do - they are screwed. And when people are in that position they tend to do what ever they jolly well please - and then blame someone else.

 

[bri5150]

The problem is Delta.

When I look in the back of my 50 seat AC and see three crews from three different DCI carriers all on a scheduled DH as part of the their trip - something is way wrong. In the red tail system DH's were very few in number - now just about every pairing has at least one scheduled DH in it.

When I report for the first flight in Regional City USA and see one AC each from five different DCI carriers at the gate - soemthing is very F'ed up. There is only one COEX and for the most part one Eagle.

Delta has hopelessly screwed up the integration of the red tail RJ's into the Delta system. They refuse to let any one carrier dominate even the smallest market so we are all spread ridiculously all over the country. Delta's marketing guru's have changed their marketing plan from one that you can staff with 5 crews per AC to one that needs 6 or 7 crews per AC. We used to need only two crews per day per AC. Now I see some schedules that require four crews a day to operate an AC. Two of those crews will be in the back of some one elses AC most of the day too. That is Delta's doing -and Delta's problem. They have the most expensive regional feed in the industry because of their marketing scheme. Yes I know it is because of their strike phobia - but they pay a tremendous price for it.

Our problem is Delta marketing has their heads too far up a dark place to realize they are the problem. PCL's and Mesaba's trips absolutely suck compared to the old red tail trips. The regional management group that realizes they need to staff 6 crews per AC to maintain good performance will be rewarded by Delta with a flogging for increasing expenses.

If you are in senior management at a DCI carrier you are in a no win position. It doesn't matter what they do - they are screwed. And when people are in that position they tend to do what ever they jolly well please - and then blame someone else.

I agree that it is Delta's doing, but it is far from Delta's problem. That is the beauty of outsourcing. Just give the other company the schedule you want flown and let them figure out the rest. At Mesaba we flew a completely empty airplane from MEM to MSL in order to bridge it over for the MSL ATL turns. If this industry was working properly, someone could have sold the seats, but instead, we get the schedule from Delta, and that was the most cost effective way of getting the flying covered from our perspective.