In a nutshell, there are so many changes going on at Southern right now, that tings are pretty crazy. And as a result, the flight crews are dealing with a full plate.
The Merger with Cargo 360 is just about done, and with that was an ownership and change of control of the company.
There is a change of our crew scheduling/travel from the small in-house department, to a private company that specializes in crew scheduling.
There have been ongoing new hire classes, one after the other, that have been adding new personnel that need to go through IOE, and get online
New Aircraft have been coming in at a rapid pace, with the C360 aircraft now online, and a handful of other aircraft arriving soon. Predictions are for the fleet to grow to over 20 aircraft by years end. It was just 4 Aircraft when I started just two years ago.
Additional contracts and adhoc fllying have been brought on, with others to follow, so instead of a handful of destinations, we are pretty much going everywhere.
And the crew group has been getting involved with creating our pairings, trying to move towards a different style of schedule, more focused towards a 2 on, 2 off kind of flying, that has crews flying more + shorter layovers, so as to get your flying in quicker and allow a return to home... Yet with the shortage of pilots, guys are staying out as long as they had before, and just flying more.
Basically, there are a lot of growing pains, and it is the Southern crewmembers that are shouldering the burden. Hopefully the crew group and new schedulers will make for some improvements in the near terms, but if we continue to grow like they have planned, it will probably be chaotic for awhile.