Gunpig

Mexc, agree with everything you say except for the seniority part. Seniority only lets you bid better lines, aircraft, bases etc. 99% of these trips are extra pairings & charters and thus not subject to seniority...first come first serve. This is unfortunately a problem of flying built after the bid pack. What is happening is the equivalent of the same jerk cutting you in line everyday for a myriad of things, just with a lot of $ on the line.

The only fair solution is real time trip trading & eliminate the scheduling aspect of OTP.

Email your block reps & negotiating committee ladies/gents. Time to fix this is now!

FDXLAG

Simply post the flights, we can figure out the rest and it will save you a hearing.

Beaver

Please do!!!!

DoodyOfficer

Maddawg71 I would not do that. However, I would let the union know they are violating the Code of Ethics and should be removed from Union. The union and company both know who the players are. We can only identify a few in the meantime we need to keep the pressure on both the union and company to rectify the problem.

Wildmanny

Whoa, guys. Let's not go off too hard here. Some of the guys may be known miscreants. Some may be hawking open time. Who knows? Not everyone is out for themselves, at everyone else's expense. At a minimum, the union and company needs to get on this and put some oversight on the issue.

magic rat

I DID email my rep, and was told the union does not discipline their own. My reply was, that they are violating ALPA Code Of Ethics ( which they love to ram down our throats) and therefore should act accordingly.

Trips are frozen until they are in a position to pick them up. If ANYTHING warrants a breach of ethics and looking into, THIS is it.. A scheduler is working in conjunction with these dudes to help then out.
I think we should keep this thread going and post the questionable trips every month.
The union is aware if it, the SCP is aware of it...and nothing us being done.

magic rat

Wait a minute, so what goes on at Firebirds and why do you know about it?

Maddawg71

Thanks Doody. I will take that sagely advice.

Last fall, I contacted my Rep, J.M., regarding this. I specifically referred to a Purple Nugget who is an OTP abuser for years. His calendar is now blocked. But when it wasn't last year, his entire year was filled with Charter trips (He was holding AM MEM hub turns with his seniority and would just drop his whole month).

J.M. said that ALPA and FedEx has talked to the select few individuals and that he thought this had come to an end. I pointed out that it had not. After a few months, he said that S.S. had brought this issue to FedEx regarding the software glitch and that they were "working" on it. That was the last I heard from J.M.

At this point, I think the only solution to this problem is to have stronger language in the next contract regarding the use of OTP. We definitely have bigger fish to fry during negotiations. But, I think this is a pretty big one! Otherwise, as long as there are sweet charters out there, this will continue to happen.

CompetentFool

My understanding regarding OTP is the advantage is they get to cherry-pick trips before the VTOs. Once the new bid month is released into open time, it's every man for himself and OTP no longer gives you any advantage. Am I right or am I rillo? So all these charters becoming available after open-time release has no relevance to OTP. They're getting these trips thru other means (like knowing the scheduler and getting inside info before the rest of you MD-11 types). Seems like this situation is causing a rift in the ranks and Fedex doesn't seem to care to fix it. Makes me wonder why?

kwri10s

If I knew a scheduler and wanted to be sly and devious. I would never have my buddy scheduler "approve" my trip pickups. In fact I would prefer he was not the primary scheduler for my plane. Then we could play games.

A little advance notice the trip is going to drop. Then all I would have to do is input my trip pick up request, then tell my bud to clean out the queue of all the requests that might have beaten me to the punch. In fact they could use all sorts of odd denial codes to clean out those in front of me. Things like, "trip not legal", "no one in seven", "no one in ten" etc. Then the scheduler at the desk would always be approving the top person in the queue when he looked at the list. It might look odd, but really hard to prove. Well, at least it would take a couple hours and someone who cared.

For good measure I could sign up to be a special projects guy so the chief pilot would think I was above reproach. Let a couple buds in the know and hello, We're in business. A little bit of charter knowledge from the green screen, like where the trips are in the build would let me project the trip number and start date, so when they did drop I'd be ready and the number of potential quicker fingered guys would be very small.

Block my calendar so the casual tracker cannot see what I'm doing. You can't block the green screen calendar, but that takes more work.

A little gratitude to my scheduler buddy. Maybe some free plane tickets with my Million Mile Delta status.

If I could throw in some way to make the company think twice about disciplining us, that would be the cherry on top.

See this cargo business is not that hard. At least I might try to do it that way.