j3cub

How about massive pay rates, DC and then ncentivize the "we are a different business model" work rules they dont want to change?. Make it expensive to have your reserve shift moved. You have to get reassigned? 300% pay. Would it be worth it to be paid out for those things? Seems like a win win for everyone.

tom11011

One thing about the stacking. They could do 2 rounds of line holder bidding. First round is unstacked and is for x percent of line holders.

akulahunter

I'm not bluffing! lol But for real... I'll try to answer as best as I can. I have a level two or three (maybe) understanding of how the entire system works, but here goes.

First, Yes, as I said in my other post. Several other airlines use NavBlue and as I said in that post, they counter the unstacking with a staffing model. For example, (made up numbers to explain the concept) if there are 8 flights that need to be staffed, the staffing model will require 15 pilots. X% reserve coverage, plus a couple for days off, plus a couple of guys on vacation, plus X% slop. This ensures that if #1 Pilot wants off, there is coverage for that guy to have off and for there to be guys on vacation, etc. An example of a staffing model would be what united has which is something like this: Block hours/87 + 12% Reserves + charter hours/87 + sick hours + vacation + Training = Staffing. That way the airlines have enough people to properly staff the flying while also accounting for all of the sick/vacation/training/etc. Our company routinely plans on utilizing VFNs and OT pick ups to cover flying. If they had a required staffing model, they wouldn't be able to do that.

I covered the "how does a staffing model fix that" portion. Now for the 100% disregard portion. With 100% unstacking, they would have the ABILITY to disregard 100% of your bid. With 0% they wouldn't have any of that ability. Functionally, if all the lineholders wanted off, it would build reserve coverage/lines to cover that day with reserves (and I believe one or two extra reserves in case something happened). Functionally, since it is an algorithm and not a person doing the scheduling, it is unlikely that it would disregard 100% of your bid. It would run thousands of iterations to come up with a solution that would create the least amount of impact. However, if you're the number one guy in base and want day X off and you don't get it because it was the least amount of impact, are you going to care? No, you're most likely going to be ****ed and complain about how you got screwed by the PBS system.

Thus, you either need 0% unstacking OR a staffing model that requires them to carry enough pilots to prevent that from happening. I think the line in the sand is that MG doesn't want either of those so that the company can continue to understaff the airline to save money.

Again, I'm not an expert, just have a passing knowledge of how it works. There are probably less than a handful of people who know intricately how the back side of the PBS system works, and none of them work for the company lol

As far as SmartPref, maybe you weren't here or missed it somehow. The company and union worked with SmartPref for a couple of years trying to work out a PBS that fit our ridiculous CBA. We would have been the first major airline to utilize SmartPref for their primary bidding software and SmartPref went out of their way to rewrite code to fit (free of charge) our PBS. At the end of the day, they solved the problem and had a completely functional PBS for our CBA and the company said nah, we'll keep CBI. The company was so ****ed that they decided to shut the doors. They even wrote a whole article blasting Allegiant and its culture. If you are one of our pilots, do a quick FB search on the official page for "SmartPref." I don't think the whole article is still available, but in one of the posts about it AW copied a couple of the lines from the article in the text. And if you were really interested, I'm sure someone still has the full article if you ask.

I agree, if you haven't dealt with PBS or taken the time to call AR to have him explain it, it's pretty damn confusing. Hell, it's pretty damn confusing even if you do that. As far as the contract comparison goes, don't know. My guess is that the stuff in the contract comparison is industry standard stuff and a staffing model isn't necessarily industry standard in a way that could be utilized here. SWA is still using line bidding for example. To be fair, I'm not sure how you could do a staffing model here with our base structure. There isn't a staffing model that would cover LAS/SFB and cover TYS/BLI. If we had a system-wide model, the company could still understaff individual bases and overstaff others.

Jim Rockford

Very telling.

akulahunter

Thank you for posting this. It should be required reading for all of our Pilots. Along with MGs Pre-union emails etc. They shed light on the kind of people that we work for and what they think about us.

rdneckpilot

what if he doesn’t care about growth?

what if MG has a plan to allow the airline to settle into a steady state that is sustainable under the current contract?

Seriously considering the possibility of the above is a big reason why I left allegiant. I wish you all the best and really hope that I’m wrong but my gut tells me no one on the seniority list has MG cornered.

SladeTin

The biggest thing holding the company back from returning to the “old school” model is aircraft. They could get away with barely flying old, beat down, paid for MD80’s. They can’t do that with the newer airplanes they have which are nowhere near being paid for. That’s why we lost money when everyone else was making money. Our utilization was horrific.

new guy

So, what if a new hire is coming here to fly his butt off and upgrade fast. Willing to move to wherever the most junior base is that flies a lot (are those mutually exclusive)?

I don't care about being home every night. I care about making a paycheck that confuses the CAs making less than me, picking up every hour I can when off, and flying 1000 hours by mid November each year and being off in December to go snowboarding in the Alps.

What's the base for me?

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flydiamond

we are hiring for attrition only right now so you won’t move up fast in any base, even the ones like flint or Appleton. However, probably would make the most in a large base with that mindset, but you’d need to be mid seniority which can take years. Las tends to have had more movement than most other recently.

and you won’t upgrade fast in a base you start off at as a new hire. You won’t upgrade at all until there is a new contract which will likely take some time. The company is literally treading water rn.

new guy

Thank you. I appreciate this.

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