Forty-six pilot volunteers from 22 ALPA and non-ALPA pilot groups gather for ALPA’s Day of Operations/Crew Desk Scheduling Workshop at the Association’s McLean, Va., offices.

ALPA master executive council (MEC) Scheduling Committees work with their respective airlines, at varying participation levels, to construct and evaluate the pairings and lines of flying their pilots will bid for and fly on a monthly basis. However, these committees are just as involved with the intricacies of day-to-day crew desk and tracking procedures, schedule decision-making, contract compliance, and system efficiencies.

To better understand each MEC’s degree of involvement and scheduling best practices in use, ALPA’s Economic & Financial Analysis (E&FA) Department conducted the third in a series of scheduling events, the Day of Operations/Crew Desk Scheduling Workshop. Forty-six pilot volunteers from 22 ALPA and non-ALPA pilot groups assembled at the Association’s McLean, Va., offices on September 18–19 to compare their different approaches. Moderating the two-day symposium were Jeff Nooger, an ALPA senior scheduling and work-rule analyst, and Cory Tennen, lead scheduling and work-rule analyst—two former airline pilots with firsthand scheduling experience.

Everyday scheduling processes include determining reserve assignments; trip cancellations/reassignments; scheduling modifications like trip trades, pickups, and drops; and the software used to administer these functions. The detailed nature of these daily activities is further complicated by the fact that every airline’s system is different. Nooger and Tennen addressed these and other topics through pilot and staff presentations and open discussions about current practices and common challenges pilot groups encounter.

Members of the United MEC System Schedule Committee spoke to workshop participants about their specific responsibilities. Capt. Steve Smolek (United) is one of six ALPA volunteers who works on the carrier’s Network Operations Control floor to resolve pilot scheduling issues as they arise. Smolek also answers Pilot Data Reports (PDRs), the United version of the union’s DART network, providing timely responses to pilot questions specifically about scheduling. “Referencing PDRs with crew-scheduling inquiries,” he noted, “we’re up to 8,000 so far this year. Since 2022, coming out of COVID, we’ve averaged about 8,500 per year. We’re on pace to go over 10,000 this year.”

In 2019, United Airlines processed approximately 216,000 pilot trip-trade requests. Capt. Jerome Mauricio (United) observed that the year-to-date total for that count, as of the date the workshop was held, was nearly 224,000. According to Mauricio, this enormous volume “requires both parties to explore continued improvements and enhancements.”

Dispute resolution was another key area of discussion, and Matt Harris, an ALPA senior attorney, talked about flight-duty periods and pilot fatigue, emphasizing the union’s “fly-it-now, grieve-it-later” approach if the flight in question is safe to operate. He noted the importance of officially documenting crew-scheduling encounters when pilots question the legality of an extension or reassignment.

Workshop attendees also heard from Capt. Doug Marchese (JetBlue), ALPA’s Flight Time/Duty Time (FT/DT) Committee chair, who talked about the committee’s work with the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, an aviation industry stakeholder coalition researching aviation risk mitigations. Addressing upcoming FT/DT events, he commented, “As we get closer to next year’s conference and start to put together an agenda, we’d really like to hear about what’s happening at your carrier.”

The use of processing software for monthly calendars and crew tracking was another hot topic as workshop participants reviewed the available tools ALPA pilot groups are currently using. These include the AIMS system, Boeing’s Jeppesen Crew Management System, Airbus’s NavBlue, Lufthansa Systems Netline Crew, CAE Crew Manager (Sabre), and several in-house offerings. Scheduling reps drew from their personal experiences to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each of these applications.

Other presentations included a look at Southwest Airlines online trip-trading and monthly open-time tables by Capt. David Cox (Southwest), and a conversation about reserve availability periods and the application of long-call (10 to 14 hours from airport check-in) and short-call (two-hours from check-in) reserve duty at different airlines.

“Scheduling approaches continue to evolve as the environment changes, technical applications improve, and pilots address new concerns and new capabilities in the labor contracts they negotiate,” remarked Tennen.

“The value of bringing pilot schedulers together from different airlines to talk about how we manage this complex network of processes and procedures can’t be overstated,” said Nooger. “This is yet another example of the mantra of ALPA’s president that through events like this we’re moving forward together.”

Since last fall, previous ALPA scheduling workshops have focused on the use of preferential bidding systems and pairing/rotation constructions. ALPA’s E&FA Department will continue this series with future workshops/conferences.