ASA Sept Lines

[Medeco]

I FLY I have to tell you that as bad as ASA's lines are the trips at DAL are not much better. Most are four days. There are very few three days on the 88. The 73N has a lot of three days, but on the 88 it is the four days with five legs and a nine hr over night and then a two leg day with an 18 hour overnight.
It is just the way that they are all scheduling. It stinks, but the grass is not greener over here in that regard.

Yeah, well at least you guys have better hotel language that defines where the company will put you based on number of hours on the ground. That makes a huge difference on a crappy 4 day trip.

Medeco

 

[Sawmill]

WTF!!!

In 7.5 years here at ASA, this is the worst I have ever seen the lines. Here's the horrible rundown..

On the CRJ200, of the 326 lines there is only "1" 3-day line!!!, the rest are mostly 4-days and naps (standups).

2 lines have 16 days off.
13 lines have 14 days off.
41 lines have 13 days off.
That means 83% of the lines have 12 days off or less!!!!

I know Delta slows down during September, but that does not justify all 4-days. This is beyond ridiculous. If the company doesn't settle the contract in 2 weeks, I have a feeling September will have the worst "On Time" performance ever.

I know I have delayed lots of flying due to maintenance. Add in the 35 minute turns Delta wants us to do in ATL. Yea right! Notice how there are no lunch or dinner breaks built in? Thats one delay right there. I "encourage" my crew to take care of there nutritional needs.

What a lame-a$$ excuse for a company!!:angryfire

Man! That does stink...Im in the same boat though. I have to work every Monday through Thursday and only get every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off! On top of that, I am forced to sleep in my own bed every night and only get 30 days of vacation a year! And if thats no enough, my take home is so much I am forced to have to save some of it because I cant find the time to spend it all (also forcing me to have to pay for my 1st class seats on aircraft)! Unbelievable!

 

[ACL65PILOT]

I have to agree with that. The long hotels are all great. Even the short ones are "good" by ASA's standards.

There are new hires doing 36 hrs in CDG. I may be one of them soon. We will see what happens after the next AE.

 

[John Pennekamp]

By now most of you have seen the September schedules and have asked questions about the pairings and bid lines. Specifically some of you have asked, “What happened??, these are the worst pairings and lines ever”. When I originally sent you an email about the September schedules on July 29, I knew there were going to be struggles for the computer pairing program to meet your expectations and ours.
There are a few things that have caused the situation we are in today from where we were in September 2006 or even last month. The schedule file from Delta every month is different and forces ASA to create new pairing solutions for almost every week of every month. This was the case in September as the first week in September had flying gutted from it due to the Labor Day holiday schedule. Every week in September is different as we are moved in and out of markets, we will fly to some markets on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Comair (or insert another DCI carrier) will fly on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday is a whole new carrier, we don’t have the frequency in the market like we have had in the past and finally there are markets in September that are a CRJ200 on one day, a CRJ700 at the same time the next day and then either switch to the CRJ200 or an ATR the next day and so on. Delta continues to match aircraft to the marketplace and is doing more day of the week scheduling in order to maximize revenue which is understandable.
We also have had 6000 hours pulled from the schedule in September from what we were flying in August. One of the goals for September was to reduce the number of reduced rest overnights and an overall reduction in the scheduled duty hours in a day. Crew Planning was asked to plan trips at a minimum of 10:30 hours in an outstation if at all possible and reduce scheduled duty days to 12-13 hours. We have pushed too many of you to long duty days and then short overnights. Understand your time at home is important but we also must ease off your long days and short overnights. ATL is a challenging airport and we have taken too many hits with crew delays in the mornings in outstations due to crew rest issues or cancellations due to crews timing out. IROP situations on one day flow down into the next two or three at times due to crew rest issues.
All pairing optimizer programs are programmed to make the most efficient pairings possible. They are built on pure mathematical computations that grind out the best overall solution. We asked AOS to help in September with minimizing the number of reduced rest overnights. The program generated a lot of four day trips since they are the most productive overall. Now I know some of you are not convinced. But think of it like this, the computer is trying to use the least number of crews overall for the month or any given day. For every four day trip created, the overall trip days to be covered in a month are less than if you had more three and two day trips. Meaning for every four day trip that is broken apart, it takes one three day and one two day trip to cover the same amount of flying. I will be happy to explain this more in my recurrent class visits because some of this needs to be white boarded out and also give you the opportunity to challenge me on the concepts. It is easier to explain with diagrams than words. I will also spend time with anyone about this on my Friday visits in the crew lounge. The entire Crew Planning department is in New York this week receiving further training on the system. We plan to spend some time with Delta to see if there are ways to reduce the number of market in/outs we do to stabilize the schedules more. I appreciate your feedback and October will have to be a month that we do better on your schedules.
Scott

So Scott's blaming Delta. How original. But he's "happy" to challenge anyone on the issue in recurrent. Get 'em boys!

 

[Tomct]

So Scott's blaming Delta. How original. But he's "happy" to challenge anyone on the issue in recurrent. Get 'em boys!

Can't WAIT for him to come into my recurrent.
THE GLOVES ARE OFF!!!!!:angryfire Hope that there is someone very strong in there....they might just have to pull me off the STUPID B@STARD!

 

[SilverandSore]

Can't WAIT for him to come into my recurrent.
THE GLOVES ARE OFF!!!!!:angryfire Hope that there is someone very strong in there....they might just have to pull me off the STUPID B@STARD!

<sarcasm>Ohhhh, the gloves are coming off! Oh no! ASA pilots are gonna get mad now. Why, they're gonna give it to Scott in recurrent! He's trembling I'm sure!</sarcasm>

Come on guys, face it. Everyone talks a mean game in here, and maybe 3% of the pilots on the line actually do something about it. But for every one of you, there are 20 others calling ops 4 times to get the flight out on time or stepping over each others d!cks on ops to keep things running (I heard you begging for an air cart the other day with no APU ON THE HOTTEST F'ING DAY OF THE YEAR!)

I listen to you all whining in here and in the crew room. About half the time the stuff that comes from your mouths is embarassing. I'm not defending ASA management, don't take that from this (I know someone will, the first response to this is going to be about me being a management hack). But damn, half of the crap you guys spew on about sounds like it was dreamed up by a group of pre-pubescent retards. It's obvious most of you have never been involved in running a business.

I listened to a captain the other day in the crew room whining that Delta doesn't control us. If we don't like the schedule they hand down we can just tell them no. Then we can build better lines for us. It's all about us.

B!tch about the lines all you want but the fact is Delta determines where we fly and when with what type aircraft. The software then matches crew availability with aircraft utilization. The sad fact is the resultant in no way violates our contract. How can that possibly be something that you can 'take the gloves off' for?

My problem with all the whining is that the legitimate gripes are grouped with the idiotic gripes and it makes all of us look worse.

So aside from your personal control of your airplane, the one other thing you can do is get the word out that ASA is not the place to come to for a new hire. I talked a 700/300 hour guy out of applying at ASA. He's from Atlanta. He would have been a great candidate for new hire. This may affect me down the road (as we shrink if they can't fill seats) but it felt awfully good to undermine the company that way. So there ya go, my two cents.

 

[ASARJMan]

Scooty will be in the crew lounge this Fri. Give him hell! Ya'll are doing good out there on the line. Refusing deferred APUs, writing up legit mtc items, not as many calls on the radio. That's what it's gonna take. And then there's next week........ask around for what that is.

 

[Tomct]

Well Silver/sore...count me in the 3%. I do NOTHING to help this SH!THOLE! I can't WAIT for IDIOT Hall...or Tutt....or Leduche! Got NOTHING to lose and might as well let them FEEL some frustration.:angryfire

 

[John Pennekamp]

B!tch about the lines all you want but the fact is Delta determines where we fly and when with what type aircraft. The software then matches crew availability with aircraft utilization. The sad fact is the resultant in no way violates our contract. How can that possibly be something that you can 'take the gloves off' for

Delta may give ASA crap to work with, but ASA's problem is what they do with it. Maybe you weren't here for the Willy era, followed by the Mike McClain era, but the lines were night and day with the same crap from Delta. ASA chooses to put minimum effort into building the lines by electronically building them for efficiency, and doing no further tweaking. Mike used to run the lines 4-5 times just to tweak them for employee satisfaction. We had 20 hour three day trips with 14+ days off. It just took a little more time and effort.

ASA can still do this. They just don't care or don't want to. That's why we're all pissed.

 

[Oakum_Boy]

At least they could do it for the old men. I mean, a guy who's been doing three day trips for years. That isn't just. There are certain things seniority buys and the company needs to acknowledge that otherwise they're asking for it.