I sat in on the "focus group" for reserves yesterday.
We had about 12 pilots, and at different times of the day we had the decision makers from scheduling, crew planning, as well as Charlie and Scott.
The reason for this group was to help these decision makers understand why we have had spikes in Fatigue calls.
All of the pilots in there had been on reserve for a minimum of 2.5yrs and up to 5yrs intermittently.
The main points we pinpointed and drove home to these "decision makers" were as follows.
* Constant reschedules/additional assignments and the unknown is never ending and fatiguing
* min rest/max duty (also known as Fake naps)
* Bullsh!t "courtesy calls" on days off
* Change in sleep cycles (6am reserve being put to rest at 6:01am)
* Asking the company to apply technology that allows individual pref, on thinks like courtesy calls, etc...
* Too many RRR assigned to the airport and not being used, and overall efficiency of crews (line holders and Reserves) is not good. DH's in both directions, etc...
As you might imagine, much of the day was spent with everyone having a story of personal experience and rants, but I think we have a chance of getting something out of this, If the pilot group has the knowledge that Charlie T. promised improvements.
Some facts (like them or not)
*We are properly staffed, but the company has made a financial decision to try and save money by driving down line values. This will change in June and line values will go up at least 10hrs, creating more reserves.
*Schedulers are faced with an impossible task with reserves that has now rolled over into lineholders being JM and extended. Charlie admits, that April was a big mess and will fix this(we shall see)
* You cannot please everyone, and no matter what the company does they will hear from someone,or a group, or ALPA. In many ways when common sense should prevail on a decision by scheduling, they are limited by our contract. A very good point was drivin' home though, that when scheduling is in a TOTAL bind, they will bend the rules in both directions
* We have CP's that say 75% of fatigue calls are BS. Examples that SH noted would be someone calling in fatigued because they had to take/pickup their girlfriend to the Airport at 2am, or someone who just got back from vacation and admitted they were tired from getting in late. We all agreed that they could be fatigued, but those kind of calls are not the companies problem and should not be paid. The point was asked what about fatigue calls from reserves, to which they had no numbers or answer.
* We are re-branding the company officially on the 21st of May. They believe that the public knows the name "ASA" but they have no idea who Atlantic Southeast Airlines is, therefore "ASA" will go away and a possible complete name change could be down the road.
* A no confidence in CP's was voiced by some, and it was asked to SH if they new ATL CP to be hired would please be a recent line pilot rather than someone who lives in a box or the GO.
* JP and DB in planning and scheduling are worthless
I'm sure I left out something.
M
