Something to think about Saturdays! Efficient: being effective without wasting time or effort or expense The Others will tell you that our company does not build efficient pairings. And from their side of the fence the company doesnt. And so begins the exact same story at every airline for hundreds of years and the beginning of time. Moral of the story people, shocking as it may be; air crews and management never see eye to eye on this. Like never, ever! Management speaks cents-and-dollarnese while air crews speak 3-day-shopping-in-Paris-high-creditnese. Blergh! I cannot take this anymore. Sweet baby Jesus and all his merry men, so help me: we do not make per diem people! Somebody tell the Others while were chatting over here. Meal cost replacement or otherwise known as MCR and hotel costs are itty-bitty fish in BIG pond of cost control. The departments responsible for most things in an airline are marketing and network planning. Little is known about these elusive and exclusive groups who reside on the 4th floor or is it the 3rd? What is known is that you have to be a hipster or IQ level 140 to even get close. Seriously though, its marketing and network planning that set the ball in motion for all things schedules. Marketing and network planning are the all knowing oracles that make sure we have the right planes going to the right places, at the right times, while balancing the right prices. Marketing does such an amazeball job that most of us are working on planes so full, the only place to do inflight yoga is in the galley while we eat our lunch with eau dtoliet and butt-in-face special viewing. Weve all been there. Next stop, crew planning. Marketing gives crew planning all the legs that need to be crewed. No way, no how on Gods green earth can an operation our size with the scheduling complexities we have AND have some poor soul do it by hand. A person is smart, but a computer is SO much more capable at handling algorithms to solve the mathematical equation known as systems and logistics of our expansive schedule. Have you seen our route map lately? Ya, now compare that to Hawaiian Airlines and just try to make a justifiable argument we are comparable. (...Ill save you the effort. It just aint gonna happen) All airlines use some type software optimizer to piece together all the legs that need to be flown and covered into legal pairings following CARS and the obligations of working terms and conditions stated within the agreement/contract plus integrating the turn times, aircraft utilization hours and RONs the company sets. The computer spits out a schedule which is looked over for that human touch and worked over until it passes the rounds of approval and released to us on that magical day when we check Facebook every 5 minutes to see if our skeds are out. Abracadabra alakazam! You now have a schedule you love one month, like another and hate every three months. This leads most of us to wonder who the hell did you piss off to end up with the schedule you did. Yup, been there and have the t-shirt in a lot of different sizes. What comes next? These 7-misunderstood-words: Why cant we have more efficient pairings?!? Still with me? Good. We are an equity based airline where we do not use a PBS. A what? A preferential bidding system otherwise known as seniority. We miss a step most airlines complete which is taking the legally built pairings and inputing them into a software system that awards pairings to the most senior first and cascading the left overs down the seniority list until the only flying is entire months of reserve lines for the most junior. In our system, we all have equal opportunity to bid for flying and preferences competing against everyone else. Simple economics of supply and demand. Most of us want a premium schedule like Edith is awarded and been with company 45 years. Not one company can build all pairings to be 7 hours of credit each day even though we think they should. The company builds the most cost effective schedule it can because the scheduling optimizer is also loaded with data like average crew cost, TAFB costs (MCR and hotel), outstation costs (airport fees, outsourced/contract handler costs) and more financial data. Management wants their total dollar outlay to be as low as possible. Ergo the argument that 5 days are not efficient does not hold up. We just have differing views on prioritizing what efficiency means from each side of the fence. Even within our own ranks, air crews have mixed opinions on what makes a pairing desirable, or not desirable. We also have extremely opposite ideas of how pairings should be awarded. One small little quandary is how to work within our heritage and our amazing corporate culture passed down to us by our founding fathers which is an equity based model. A model the large majority of us want to keep but are starting to get a bit cramped in this one box as our family grows, grows and grows some more. Some are looking for a revolution, reality of the situation appears to be a case for a more organic evolution. I cannot tell anyone how to think. I can only make you stop and think. Choose wisely folks!
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:53:28 +0000
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