Scheduling

[mckpickle]

Hey folks. I was hoping you'd share a little info with me. Our airline is starting up a charter department. We are "planning" to run scheduled charter. Another words, all the trips will be preplanned. However with a home base system I'm not sure how we can get pilot A from, say CLE to DAY to start at 1300 or pilot B from SEA to Day. See what I mean? We wouldn't know who bid the schedule and where they lived until the bids are awarded. How do you folks do it? Is your first day a positioning day? Or do you not bid on hard schedule at all and just have a set amount of days that you're "on duty".

Any info you can share and any pitfalls to beware of would be appreciated.

 

[brokeflyer]

Hey folks. I was hoping you'd share a little info with me. Our airline is starting up a charter department. We are "planning" to run scheduled charter. Another words, all the trips will be preplanned. However with a home base system I'm not sure how we can get pilot A from, say CLE to DAY to start at 1300 or pilot B from SEA to Day. See what I mean? We wouldn't know who bid the schedule and where they lived until the bids are awarded. How do you folks do it? Is your first day a positioning day? Or do you not bid on hard schedule at all and just have a set amount of days that you're "on duty".

Any info you can share and any pitfalls to beware of would be appreciated.

First day is usually travel but not always, depends on how long you spend traveling. It's would be smart for your company to position those guys a day ahead of time. If you send them out from SEA to DAY first thing in the am they are on duty......the clock starts when they show up in SEA so they are buring half their day just traveling to the plane. Add some weather or a broke plane and then you can run into duty time limits beofre your charter even leaves.

 

[jtf]

NJA is mostly 7 on and 7 off with only your days on duty scheduled (seniority gets you the 7 & 7 line you want and vacation, but nothing else for your schedule). We all have company issued Blackberries that we get our duty briefs and releases on. They need to let us know the schedule for day 1 by 7pm the night before at the latest (or 10 hours minimum before any scheduled duty). You are briefed for the next day during the tour when the company shuts you down for the day. We never know what we'll be doing for sure since the briefs often change multiple times per day and often overnight. The customers often schedule their flights days or weeks in advance, but with the flights that pop up at the last minute and airplanes that break, it's impossible to make a hard schedule for even a day at a time.

ExpressJet will most definitely fail in this charter business if the pilots force them into hard schedules since that just doesn't work in this kind of environment. I'm sure your union will need to make some changes to the CBA to accomodate this business and the pilots will have to be able to accept not knowing anything but the days you will be on and off for success. Even that is not something that many charter companies offer their employees. I suggest taking a long, hard look at the NJA contract for how to get things done as far as scheduling. Not all our rules are FARs and there are a lot of monetary incentives to keep the company from abusing us as much as the would without them. Also try to get the contract to reject those 16 hour duty days- too brutal and UNSAFE. Go for a no questions allowed fatigue call also at the minimum if they won't budge on the 16 hour day issue since the pilots can then take it into their own hands without having to have constant chats with management over why they don't want to be on duty for 16 hours. Think hard about what you put into your contact for this stuff or you will be abused and sorry you didn't take the time to research enough. Good luck.