idlethrust

Every aspect of express is a complete joke . United doesn’t care about the express operation,it’s obvious. I would suspect that most of the delays are on the express side anyway .

Grumble

Shack. Push crew wants an on time and it would be perfectly acceptable and safe to give it to them.... if it weren’t for that sentence in the FOM.

Until that changes....

cal73

Yep can't even release to capture on the electros. Its almost as if the folks writing the flight oops manual; A. are simply looking for a way to slice a minute or two off block times & B. don't fly the line.

Bravo high fives all around.

Andy

In contract talks. What a perfect time for management to make it difficult/near impossible for on time statistics. It makes for some nice ammo in any lawsuit as to how pilots have been breaking status quo - just look at the statistics, your honor.

On the bus, lately it seems the best I can make up on a transcon is maybe 5 minutes by flying .as fast as possible the entire flight. I hit turbulence and have to slow down, there goes some of that time I made up. And if I get slowed down/vectors by ATC, I'll be lucky to be an on-time arrival.

Yes, they've definitely shortened the block times. But they've also increased gate and aircraft utilization rates. Arrive early and many times the gate's occupied because there are no spare gates. There's simply less slack in the system right now.

While I try to make sure I'm on time all of the time, I'm not losing any sleep over our performance numbers. All of that is well beyond my pay grade.

Andy

B goes without saying.
Don't forget to check that your IRUs are in 'Nav'.

Hatesheavys

It’s a direct result of damaged airplanes, I know a guy that released early and rolled back, broke an aoa or pitot tube off, took AC out of service in an outstation. A few incidents like that I get why it’s in the FOM now.

Larry in TN

I think a lot of that is due to the MAX grounding. They're trying to operate more flights than the current number of aircraft can comfortably support to avoid cancelling even more flights due to the grounding.

Even without the grounding, it's a balancing act. Schedule too loosely and your on-time numbers are great but your aircraft, facilities, equipment, and labor are underutilized. Summer of 2015 was overscheduled as Jeff was trying to get as much revenue out of the assets he had at the time. Delays spiked. Oscar came in and schedules relaxed a bit and on-time stats improved significantly. Scott tightened things up a bit and we settled into a solid second place in D:00. Then the MAX grounded pushed us into our current situation.

cal73

Friend of yours?

That guy deserves Time off without pay. The pilot group doesn’t deserve to be retrained for that.
2¢

Andy

This. ^^
And if this guy did that with the push crew telling him he’s clear to release brakes, getting a clearance from ramp/ground to push isn’t going to change that. But I’ll bet a dollar he wasn’t talking to the push crew.

Poss

Instituted during the P McDonald era. It's all about the Benjamins.

Gotta love those conditional push clearances to get you going. Are you really cleared to push as soon as he says "cleared to push after XXX" or are you cleared when the condition becomes valid?