TFAYD

people are out of position regardless of where they are based. Many pairings touch EWR from all sorts of bases

LJ Driver

Understood, and I agree. But if the company assigned more pilots to EWR and not less there would be more people there to help absorb these events.

UALinIAH

I’ll respectfully disagree with your opinion on this. More people assigned to a base doesn’t mean more people move there. It’s been positive space for crews all week but if the flights cancel commuters can’t get there.

Aquaticus

It absolutely makes it more difficult staffing ewr with other bases but it exponentially makes it more difficult to piece everything back together after a storm. Ewr 737 has never been this small with this amount of flying. They opened mco taking 15% of the list, expanded middle of the country bases, and the new terminal makes the base even more difficult for commuters forcing them to look at easier commutes. You need a more robust base for this exact scenario. The new manpower guy has some explaining to do or he needs a carrot or a stick to staff the flying. Having 800 people on reserve in IAH was never a good idea.

LJ Driver

If there are 100 pilots assigned to EWR and 40 live in base (no idea how accurate that is), increasing that number will increase by some amount the number that choose to live there. Or a higher percentage could be placed on reserve to try to cover down.

I’m all for incentivizing living in the area as I already do and it’s great, but until the company and the FAA fix the multiple issues at EWR it will continue to be a poo show.

Viperstick

Can someone explain why the Pilot Service Center operates (LITERALLY!!!) on banker's hours?

Lifeson2112

what if I was in a pool?

Lanceair

I disagree, this debacle proved that meltdowns can only be fixed by having crews available to drive in, like, you know, the whole 5 hour radius thing? When the poop hits the fan in EWR, you can’t rely on the pilots flying in from ORD and the FAs coming in from IAH to operate the EWR-DEN flight. I think MCO is unique, as the FL market became much more important post Covid, and we have a lot of natural flying out of there, but there is no way MCO can replace EWR.

NYC is the financial capitol of the world, it is a diplomatic center (UN), a large tourist destination, and has a huge population density, there is no way to replace it.

Again, manpower planning has never asked for my opinion, but we need to staff up EWR, or simply account for 4 to 5 multiple day IROPs in our business plan.

Sniper66

EWR should have
15% more pilot positions than a normal hub
No other solutions

iahflyr

Your post is way off. I didn’t quote the rest because I didn’t want anyone reading it again.

United only flies from MCO to its hubs. It’s no different than any other outstation. It became a single fleet pilot base because it has a lot of flights (and will increase once TPA is added to the base), so it made a lot of sense to add it as a pilot base.

United has no plans to add any non-hub flights to Orlando. They tried this during COVID and have since removed them. Even if they did add some flights, it would only be a handful of high traffic point to point legs. United is not planning to route connecting traffic through MCO.

United already moved some of the connecting traffic from EWR to IAD a few years ago to reduce the strain on O&D traffic at EWR.

United would grow EWR if they had the capacity. Unfortunately this time it wasn’t lack of capacity or gates that caused the meltdown, but a lack of ATC staffing, which is planned to be fixed by next summer. I bet this past week doesn’t change United’s plan at EWR at all.