SWA to speed up Airtran integration.....article

[redflyer65]

There's a few differences here guys..

1- Getting rid of trip just to be off from work.

2- Getting rid of trip to swap into a better trip.

3- Getting rid of trip to be available for premium time.

It's personal preference in what your trying to achieve. I usually pick up 2-3 trips from other pilots. I never even look at company open time, but that's just me. Everyone has their techniques to accomplish what they want.

As 717 said, it would be nice to incorporate a pure trip drop with the company. Again, it would all depend on the availablity of other pilots to cover it.

 

[Lear70]

Lear: certainly the company can deny your drops if there isn't enough reserve coverage, can it not? Just curious.

Sure, there's a reserve grid, and there's a formula that they have to follow for determining the reserve floor.

For instance, I'm looking at January's reserve grid in MCO right now, there are only 2 days in Red (below coverage), the 1st and the 2nd where they have a higher reserve floor because of the holiday.

There's 1 day in black = the same number of reserves available as required by the floor. You'll still get denied a drop or non-vertical swap (trading out of a day for another day) for that.

The other 28 days are all in green, which means ANY drop/swap I request that is on those days will be approved. Weekends included, and it's an automatic process. A scheduler never touches it unless it's IROPS (Irregular Ops) and they need more control over the system until flying is back to normal.

Our premium time also isn't seniority-based, it's first-come, first-served which means even the junior people have the opportunity to get premium time trips. Our system is much more fair in that regard, and has greater flexibility than the SWA system for the pilots.

 

[Falconjet]

Ok thanks. That sounds similar to what we have at FedEx, except we have to guess at how much reserve coverage there really is.

FJ

 

[Lear70]

There's a few differences here guys..

1- Getting rid of trip just to be off from work.

2- Getting rid of trip to swap into a better trip.

3- Getting rid of trip to be available for premium time.

It's personal preference in what your trying to achieve. I usually pick up 2-3 trips from other pilots. I never even look at company open time, but that's just me. Everyone has their techniques to accomplish what they want.

As 717 said, it would be nice to incorporate a pure trip drop with the company. Again, it would all depend on the availablity of other pilots to cover it.

There's the rub.

For now, and for the next 3-5 years, SWA will be overstaffed by their normal model, carrying at least 50% more reserves than they have traditionally. During that time period, they're going to have MORE than sufficient people to cover a straight drop option.

However, once they go back to where SWA usually keeps reserve staffing, since they fly their reserves so much, it would be more problematic. SWA carries close to 20% reserves in most bases, we historically carried between 25-30% which gave us more flexibility for that.

That said, our schedulers were horrible at utilizing reserves, were pretty inefficient with them, and could have carried fewer reserves with better management.

Also, our pilots who straight drop trips 9 times out of 10 need the hours back and therefore will find something ELSE to fly to get their credit back, often in another base, so it isn't like a ton of flying gets dumped back on the company. With the flexibility to straight drop you can easily rebuild your line with what you want while someone else takes what you had, and the reserves still fly the same amount either way.

 

[Lear70]

Ok thanks. That sounds similar to what we have at FedEx, except we have to guess at how much reserve coverage there really is.

FJ

We used to, but one of the big things we got in our most recent contract was control over this process. Todd O was actually instrumental in building a lot of the system we use now along with the Neg Comm at the time, and we really got a LOT of transparency and structure into the system.

You can see where you are in the bucket system (Reserve call-first / call-last), how many reserves there are, the actual USE of a long-call system (12 hour call out from home), trigger points to be converted to SCR (2 hr call out short-call) and limits on being assigned Ready Reserve (which they don't do much at all anymore)...

It's a pretty good system, all-in-all. Frustrating on some days when the reserve floor is retardedly high for a nearly non-celebrated holiday (who calls out sick for President's Day?) and weekends when nothing else is going on, but they're getting better about it. Hard to complain about being able to get rid of anything I want just about all month long and then grabbing a better trip later in the month when someone else drops something THEY don't want.

 

[redflyer65]

I believe SW runs far below what other majors run for reserve coverage. I'd say it's down around 12%.

Also, the premium awards are in the process of changing to random system. I don't usually even look at premium trips, but that might change.

Valid point about being overstaffed when things are complete, but an open drop system could work with both overstaffed, as well as 'right staffed' as long as the protections were there for both pilots and company.

 

[madjack]

Side note: FAT pilots are really digging the 40k raise...

 

[scoreboardII]

Jack, First off Happy New Year to you and all the folks at FI.
I'm not sure which former MKE pilots you have spoken with, but I will share with you this. The LEC chairman, at the MKE domicile, who is now at SW, is a very good friend of mine. He was one of the 8 voting members of the mec and was very much involved and right in the middle of the sli9/10 process. We would speak from time to time during the process and he would share with me a few things that he probably shouldn't have, but nevertheless he did. One of the items he shared with me was that he (Capt LEC rep) and the FO lec rep, polled their respective constituents as to how they should vote on sli 9. Mke was a relatively small base at the time, 100 pilots I think, so it was fairly easy to get input from the pilots. He told me that overwhelmingly the majority of the mke pilots told him and the fo rep to vote no on sli 9 and he also had all the documentation to prove it. I believe the MCO reps did the same thing, but not sure. Lear can probably confirm that.

Now I'm not saying that former AirTran pilots that you have come in contact with are not making it sound like a few rogue atl malcontents are pure evil and influenced the mec decision, however I think that they are being disingenuous with their answers and only telling you what you want to hear. Especially the mke guys, for you see, they made out better than anyone else in this thing. Most are way junior and are already at SW and most of them.. most of them... told their respective reps to vote no on the first agreement. Go figure.

On a purely separate note, I wonder if you and the rest of the sw guys on here and those that you run into in your travels could send a note to your negotiating committee to try and get 2 new things in the negotiations. It may be a long shot but what the hell..
1. The ability to straight drop trips. Lear and PCL are absolutely right. It's a good thing when it works.

2. To get some sort of pay when going through customs, if you keep on flying after that. You guys don't have to deal with that right now, but soon you will. Sometimes it's very frustrating when you have to go through customs and have to fly another leg after that and are stuck in line. Granted there are dedicated crew only lines, but if another international flight comes in or 2 or 3 at the same time, those lines can get very long. Lear and General Lee can certainly attest to that. Like I said long shot, but worth a try.

Lets try to get something positive here, just how does the "drop a trip" at straight pay work, and are you paid when you drop it? Or is it just the ability to drop a trip for no pay?

My contention is that will never work at SWA. SWA is not manned to allow folks to drop a trip, paid or otherwise, and have other folks fly that trip. Thats why you are hired, to fly that trip. Sick calls are covered by reserves.

The only means to currently swap trips is ELITT, and yes it sucks now, and will till the manning gets resolved, and is worse this time of year just like each and every of the past fourty years.


The only true way to drop flying is trip trading, unless another pilot wants your flying, you get to fly your flying.

It's like any industry, if you worked at a sandwich shop, and want to drop a day of work, someone has to want to work that shift, or you get to work that shift.

Please explain how the company would ever want to entertain getting involved in taking flying from guys and then have to pay someone else to fly that line?

On a brighter note, we would like something akin to that trip drop, but only once or twice a year for family needs. Not on a recurring bases.

To get this, we are going to pay for it. So please, please explain how the company would see to allow trip dropping?

Heres a tidbit on SWA efficiency in schedule, we use a 8-10% reserve manning, sick calls go about 7-8%, so there is some room in there, but not much. Now Add in other things, trip pulls, diverts, etc, and the cushion evaporates day to day. Worse, on bad days, instead of having more reserves, they online reroute, and are very efficient at that, to the tune of getting 10-15% more flying out of the guys on the line than if they didn't and just used more reserve coverage. This is especially tru while we are fat on pilots.

 

[Tripower455]

Sure, there's a reserve grid, and there's a formula that they have to follow for determining the reserve floor.

For instance, I'm looking at January's reserve grid in MCO right now, there are only 2 days in Red (below coverage), the 1st and the 2nd where they have a higher reserve floor because of the holiday.

There's 1 day in black = the same number of reserves available as required by the floor. You'll still get denied a drop or non-vertical swap (trading out of a day for another day) for that.

The other 28 days are all in green, which means ANY drop/swap I request that is on those days will be approved. Weekends included, and it's an automatic process. A scheduler never touches it unless it's IROPS (Irregular Ops) and they need more control over the system until flying is back to normal.

Our premium time also isn't seniority-based, it's first-come, first-served which means even the junior people have the opportunity to get premium time trips. Our system is much more fair in that regard, and has greater flexibility than the SWA system for the pilots.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you'd have little difficulty giving away your entire SW line in January or February.

 

[FCPhotography]

A few of my trips in OAK have already disappeared. One benefit when there isn't enough flying to go around.