Kurt Heidemann: Today's SWAPA Number is 23. That's the number of pages of SWAPA's schedule execution language that was missing from labor relations last pass of work rules. Our proposals to mitigate long days short overnights and a historic fatigue rate were completely ignored in their counter.
Amy Robinson: So today on the show we're going to talk to the three SRC members who are working with the negotiating committee to deliver protections for our pilots in contract 2020. Chair Scott Plyler, Member Dan O'Connor, and Analyst Manager Meagan Nelan will help us understand what they're saying in the room and what's holding up the work rules negotiations.
Amy Robinson: I'm Amy Robinson.
Kurt Heidemann: And I'm Kurt Heidemann, and here's our interview with Scott, Dan and Meagan.
Amy Robinson: Okay, so I understand that you're finally getting into work rules and negotiations. Why has SWAPA waited until now to negotiate those?
Scott Plyler: Well, SWAPA actually hasn't waited. We opened up with our work rules in April of 2021, so a little over two years ago, and then it took over a year to get our first counter back from the company, and that was in April of last year. We did counters and all that last summer, and while we were still waiting, we filed for mediation, and then the mediators wanted to get through the other sections instead of scheduling, because this is a scheduling-heavy contract proposal. So we didn't start getting counters until earlier this year.
Meagan Nelan: I think it's worth noting, too, that the SMEs on the company side to negotiate the work rules, it was a different set of people than it is now. So when we first went through the work rules, it's like all that time kind of got lost, because then we had to go through it again with the folks that are in there now.
Amy Robinson: So how far along actually are we in those scheduling sections, and how much longer do you think it'll take to kind of work through those to the point that we would at least reach a ratifiable deal?
Dan O'Connor: We're actually pretty close in the reserve section, or we thought we were pretty close, but what happened in July is a company actually came and un-AIPed some of the provisions and then we re-AIPed those the next day. And then we didn't make too much more progress on that, but we are pretty close in reserve, but on the other sections, we're not close at all.
Scott Plyler: I think it's important to understand how our negotiating process works. A lot of times in contract negotiations, you'll kind of go through term sheets and agree to concepts and ideas, and then you get an AIP on the concepts, and then you go and write all the language. Because this is such a scheduling-heavy rewrite, we're going through each provision, line by line, and coming to agreement on the concept and writing the provision at the same time, and that's how we get an AIP. So we might have 50 different things in reserve with an AIP on it with the language already written, so when we talk about them taking AIPs away, that means they're reverting back to old language or changing language that we already agreed on the concept and the language for. So it's a little bit different than just kind of changing your mind about a concept. We've already worked significantly, sometimes for a half-an-hour to an hour on one item just to get it right so the language reflects the actual intent in the room.
Kurt Heidemann: I'd add to that, we hear about these AIPs that these other carriers, United, American, their AIPs don't necessarily even include the language. We're not going to bring forth a deal, call it an AIP until we have everything written out. That's just how we do it differently here at Southwest compared to the other carriers.
Scott Plyler: Part of the rewrite is also to make sure we have all the intent of the language in the notes in the room. If we just agreed to the concepts and then got into a rush to actually write the language at the very end after we had a tentative agreement, that becomes a whole other negotiation just writing the language. So we're trying to get that all done upfront and in the notes instead of having that done just with a couple of people at the very end.
Amy Robinson: My understanding was that for a while we were trying to do some term sheets and get some of those concepts in front. Is that not accurate?
Scott Plyler: We were doing that last summer on some of the scheduling items. One, because of the turnover, we were having to reeducate on what our proposals were, go back to all the PowerPoints that we had done, and also we were having trouble just getting some of the concepts across. So we wanted to try to find a way to make some progress last summer. What can we agree on? What can we actually write language or agree to language on just based on talking through the concepts? We did all of that, and then unfortunately as we get a lot of our counters back this year from the company, a lot of the things that were a soft yes or, "We'll consider that," we don't even see anything at all. So it feels like last summer was largely a waste of time.
Meagan Nelan: One thing that I wanted to add about this whole AIP discussion is we were getting really close on reserve, but this last counter from the company, they added a red-eye wrap to the language, and we don't disagree that that's probably something that we need to iron out if the company's ever going to run into red-eye operation, but now every single AIP, you have to kind of go back through and look at it through that red-eye lens of do we still agree with this? How could this potentially be abused under this scenario of red-eye flying? So it's like we took a step forward, but then two steps back of having to rework through all of this language.
Dan O'Connor: Meagan makes a great point too. We're going to probably touch on co-terminals later, but it was the same issue with co-terminals and reserve. When they passed it back, they were missing a lot of provisions about how it would work with the reserve. The reserves would cover which co-terminal, that sort of language, so we need to flush all that out. So again, like we said, we were close, but they continue to introduce these new concepts. We need to go back and see how it all integrates.
Scott Plyler: New concepts. Three-and-a-half years into negotiation and almost a year into mediation, and a lot of it doesn't have language. It's just a concept.
Meagan Nelan: When we ask why didn't you add language? We're told, "Well, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, just do what the other carriers are doing." But other carriers have long call. They have a very different reserve system, they have a very different open time system. You can't just expect everybody to know what all the other contracts have in them.
Scott Plyler: And we certainly don't run off of other contracts. We run off of our contract. We need to follow ours. We certainly can't use other contracts and arbitrations. I'd certainly like to have Delta pay rates right now too, but we don't use that, do we?
Kurt Heidemann: One thing that our pilots probably don't realize is right now we're recording this podcast with you all down the SRC offsite, sequestered, rewriting the language from the previous counters. Explain what that process is, and why SWAPA is going about it.
Scott Plyler: Well, what we talked about, we're writing off of two different documents right now. The company is using current book. They seem very happy with that. That's part of why we had to leave negotiations a week ago was because they were still using their current book and started with all of the reassignment language at the very beginning that didn't acknowledge any of our proposals. They just wanted to keep doing reassignments the way they do, and I'm sure we'll get into that, whereas we have our rewrite. We've been directed by the mediators to go off of the last pass, while SWAPA made most of the last passes and scheduling prior to going into mediation, the company still has yet to merge the documents completely. We actually merged the documents for reserve and started to make a lot of progress. We've also gone ahead and merged it in exchange of flying, and we've been making some progress.
But when they started their counter of additional flying, which includes reassignments, they hadn't done that. They haven't done that in schedule planning, so we're offsite this week, the week before our Denver negotiations, merging all of these together. What's frustrating about it is we have a whole entirely new schedule execution section, 20-page document to at least spell out what can be done day-of for reassignments for if you have to do JA. What happens on your JA?
All of these things need to be spelled out a lot better, whether you get released from your deadhead, how the commuter rules work. They didn't incorporate any of those in their counter proposals. 20 pages of our proposals didn't make it. So we're putting these all together, and we will have one document, and we will try to get this jump-started again. But as of last week, when we don't have both proposals together in the same document, it makes it very, very difficult to even talk about any provision, because we have to go into our document and cross-reference, and it becomes a big waste of time.
Meagan Nelan: And I want to add that part of this whole merging of documents, so we're having to go line by line of the rewritten version that we propose and bring that into current book and move things around so that it flows better. And what we found when we were doing that is that we had a lot of agreements in principle in our last pass. Some of those, they dropped them, or they had the same language but they dropped the fact that we had the AIP on it. So we totaled that out to around 50 AIPs that got lost that now we're going to have to go back over that language again and say, "Hey, we had an agreement. Do you still agree? Did you mean to drop that AIP?" And so it's a waste of time on things that should have already been closed out that now we have to go through again.
Dan O'Connor: And obviously that's one of the main reasons that the mediators tell us to do that is obviously, it's almost impossible to use two different forms of the language. You actually can't then do AIPs to agree on that exact language. And also to use that last pass, like Meagan said, so you don't lose the previous progress you've made. So now, I'd just like to point out we've merged every section because we want this to proceed, but what happened in the last mediation session when they presented additional flying, like Scott said, we realized they did not bring ours over. So it would've been a waste of time for us to sit there with the entire group there to go line by line and try to merge it. It would've been prohibitively time-consuming.
Scott Plyler: Basically, what would've happened is we would've said, "Well, what about this to your proposed language?" And then we would've discussed it, and then he would've said, "Well, what do you suggest we write there?" And we would've said, "What we wrote in our contract 2020 proposal," and then we would cut and paste that into the chat for the group, and then they would have to cut and paste it into their language. That's why that needs to be done ahead of time. Do your prep work, do your homework. The mediators have asked us to do that. They asked them to do that. We're the only ones so far that have done it. We wind up doing all of their homework for them.
Amy Robinson: Just so we are clear, we would not have had a problem if they wanted to mark up all of our proposals that were in the rewrite and make changes to that themselves. Correct?
Meagan Nelan: That's the goal. That's what we should have been doing the last two years, really.
Amy Robinson: Why do you think they keep holding up on this? That's another question I get a lot.
Scott Plyler: Well, they make a big deal about holding onto past practice or intent, even past practice that turns into arbitrations that SWAPA admittedly has lost in arbitration, but it was all due to intent from, as people like to say, a conversation in the parking lot at the GO 20 years ago or three negotiating sessions ago, and the negotiating notes don't really say anything, and people don't have great vivid memories, or it was something that wasn't even contemplated 20 years ago, like ETOPS flying or red-eye.
Dan O'Connor: Another reason we need this rewrite obviously is so there's no ambiguity on the intent of any of the language, so we don't get in our current situation, which is hundreds of grievances.
Meagan Nelan: Just going to add from the contract admin's point of view, some of the challenges they face today is that we think the language reads pretty clearly, and the language would just say what it means. But then we see responses from the company saying that, "Oh, well, even though it says that, that wasn't the intent that the negotiators had back in 1999, and you need to revert back to a 1994 side letter," or just things to that tune of relying on language that isn't the actual contract to then drive your processes, and we're trying to get a reset on that type of back and forth.
Scott Plyler: Basically, the excuse is that the negotiators at that time didn't understand what they were doing. So the company has arbitrarily decided that they're just going to keep doing their current process, regardless of what was done in negotiations, and when we don't have clear notes from back then makes it more difficult for us to prosecute that in a grievance or arbitration.
Amy Robinson: But just to be clear, I just want to make sure that this is an understood point. There is nothing stopping them from taking whatever they believe the past practice information is and incorporating it in the language that we're proposing. Right?
Scott Plyler: That would actually be quite wonderful. That's largely what our schedule execution section is all about. Some of it isn't even changing things. We just want to spell out exactly how the process works because there really isn't much language about it in our current contract. Certainly, we have a lot of things that we want to change, and that's where management writes open to interpretation, or "If it's not in the contract, we can do whatever we want." That's the problems that we have, and we need to put some boundaries on it, because everybody out online has seen they've abused the flexibility that they've created with their arbitration wins and with the gray areas in the contract, and we need to reign that in. That's a big reason why we're doing the rewrite, that's why we're standing firm in negotiations about this, because our pilots are demanding that, and they deserve it.
Meagan Nelan: I just want to say that last week when they opened with the exact language that we have been adamant about wanting to change the way that's handled today, to open with that exact language with a comment off to the side saying no intent to current practice, that's very deflating, when we've been very consistent the last several years about wanting to see the airline run differently and for the online experience to be improved.
Kurt Heidemann: That brings up a point. We were talking about the online experience. There's that tension between we're trying to make these improvements for the pilots, and the company just looking at it as metrics or what's good for the company. Describe that from your perspective, what you see in the room.
Scott Plyler: What we see in the room is a lack of putting yourselves in pilots shoes. They just don't really understand pilots at all. Currently, they don't have anybody on their team anymore that was a pilot at all in the last decade, and certainly most of them don't have any experience with pilots other than interactions over the phone.
Dan O'Connor: And Kurt, to your point, they've repeatedly said that pilot quality of life is of no benefit to the company. It kind of encapsulates a little bit of that attitude, but also like Scott was saying, there's nobody on that team that we feel really understands the pilot experience of today out on the line. We are on track right now to exceed the number of fatigue calls from last year, which was more than the previous year. We're on this trajectory straight up, and we don't necessarily blame the schedulers when they're rerouting pilots, right? They have these tools, it's legal. So that's one of our main goals of this new contract language is to put those guardrails in to protect our pilots, because like Meagan said, they want to use this language, this irregular operations language, which, like she said, they left in and really disappointed us, but they're going to continue to use that language to reroute our pilots to the point of fatigue, and we need to reset those rules so those guidelines are there.
Meagan Nelan: So they gave us two very lengthy data presentations, and part of one of those was several examples of reassignments and showing like, "Look how efficient this was, and this is so much easier than what you've proposed, which is to use pilot preferences and is a consideration with your reassignments." And one of the examples they used was a pilot who had a significant delay on his first day, turned his PM pretty much into red-eye, he ended up landing at 5:00 AM body clock time. He ended up calling out fatigue. So his plan was just to recover his trip by deadheading. He was on an 11-hour rest period to deadhead to the next overnight. While SkySolver found him and reassigned him to then fly into another essentially red-eye. But they use that as their example of an efficient reroute, and you're just thinking, did you actually go look and validate that this was a good example of how reassignments can be a good way to recover? It just makes me very worried that nobody's really paying attention to how they're treating that online experience.
Scott Plyler: So to make things worse, now this pilot has called out fatigued. His fatigue mitigation was to do a single deadhead to catch up after just 11 hours of rest. But he accepted that, because he knew we would get rest after. He gets rerouted into yet another long sit and a red-eye flight because it was running late. He winds up calling fatigued for that because his fatigue mitigation, his recovery plan had been destroyed. So how efficient is that reroute actually when it doesn't actually work?
And then the final kicker, the final kicker is when they pulled that reassigned flight off of that pilot for a second fatigue call in 12 hours, they finally ran it through open time, and it actually got picked up in open time, which is one of the things that we keep emphasizing over and over. If you have time, try it through open time, and then you don't have to do all the stupid reassignments.
Amy Robinson: An argument for the company would be, "Well, that's just one pilot's experience." Would we say that that's standard, or is that more a one-off scenario?
Meagan Nelan: Well, they had several examples, but I think Dan said it earlier, if it's legal on paper, that's about as far as they vet anything when it comes to making decisions about changing your schedule. Some of the other examples, I mean it's all reduced rest, longer day, and these are all things that have cumulatively over time led to the highest level of fatigue that this airline has seen.
Dan O'Connor: Unfortunately, I think that the fatigue processes become part of the operational drift, where most of the time pilots think of that fatigue call as that circuit breaker, that last step that I am not safe to fly this.
Kurt Heidemann: Yeah, Dan. I think that that's something that I can piggyback on as far as being in the room. That is certainly a change in their behavior. A fatigue call is not a scheduling tool, it is a safety valve, and they're using it now as a scheduling tool.
Scott Plyler: We just literally had the highest number of fatigue calls for any month by almost 200 in July. We had 927 fatigue calls. When you think about that, that's over 10% of our pilots who bid a line, called in fatigued in July. When you look at it on a daily basis, 1 in 100 pilots will call in fatigue on any given day. Is that any way to run your airline where you're using that circuit breaker over and over on such a regular basis? It's horrifying. Frankly, it's quite scary.
Meagan Nelan: And it doesn't add up when you consider that we've got more pilots on property than we did back in 2018 running roughly the same amount of flights, so it doesn't add up. It should be getting better.
Scott Plyler: And these fatigue calls, these are pilots that are out on the line, they're trying to get the job done, they're suffering these reassignments and delays, and they're getting to the point where they're having to play a safety card. It's not convenient for pilots to call in fatigued online, because they know they're going to get reassigned, and they're not going to wind up where they were. They might wind up getting home late, they know they're going to disappoint passengers. It takes a lot for somebody to call in fatigued, because we know all the downline effects of that on ourselves and our airline and our passengers, and yet our pilots in record numbers are feeling like they need to pull that circuit breaker to keep the airline safe.
Amy Robinson: So in Carl's last update, he said something to the effect of you had meaningful discussions, and I would even argue that Carl is a pilot. So what would your counter to that be?
Scott Plyler: Well, one thing that we had discussions on, we were talking about a personal net-zero recovery days for getting JAed, and our proposal spelled out in language was a personal net-zero where you can actually trade down an ELIT, that number of days regardless of the net-zero or your actual personal count. It's a way for you to get a recovery day if you want one.
What happened in the room when we got the counter proposal is our entire language was struck for the personal net-zero, all of it. And then they said, "Well, we have our own concept for it." We're like, "Okay, well where's your proposal?" "Well, we just wanted to talk about it." Then when we actually talked about it, line by line, it was exactly what we had in our language, minus they wanted to have a limit for how long you had to be able to use it. We were like, "Why did you even strike our language if your proposal is basically exactly what we just had in here," and there was no answer for that.
Meagan Nelan: Not even a proposal, it was a supposal is the term being used when you have an idea but you don't actually put it in language.
Scott Plyler: So we're a year into mediation, you're giving us this supposal that actually matched the language that we had. So when they would ask us, "Well, what do you propose." "What we put in contract 2020 and three-and-a-half years ago." The other part that was a little bit frustrating and goes to show you that they do not understand the pilot experience at all is that we have it applying to any JA, whether you get JAed for a pairing the next day or you get an RON JA, you've lost a day off, you need to recover that day off. It wasn't due to your fault, it was the operation or whatever, but you lost a day off. What they proposed was you would only get that recovery day, their supposal was that you would only get a recovery day if it was a pairing starting the next day.
Well, the majority of our JA and our days off are because of being reassigned into something, and then you can't get back that next day, and now you're flying or deadheading the next day. We were told straight out, "Well, because most of those RON JAs are just a deadhead back to domicile, you aren't really working." Let that sink in. When you have a night and a day taken away from you, the company feels that you aren't really working. These are the same people that took an extra day off when they came back from Seattle, because they came home on Saturday so they took a day off that we couldn't negotiate the next week because they lost a day off. But for you, you don't get that same consideration.
Kurt Heidemann: So another theme that's very common that we're hearing in the negotiating room is the company needs to maintain flexibility. It's all about flexibility. So give us an example of that.
Meagan Nelan: I think we said this already that we wrote over 20 pages of your day of execution rules. At a minimum, you think that they could at least counter with what rule set do they use today to make decisions, but we haven't even seen that. I think that's because they don't want to document because they want the ability to just do whatever they want on any given day and not have any accountability to follow any rules.
Kurt Heidemann: Are we trying to handcuff them though? I think that that's the concern that we're hearing from the C-suite.
Meagan Nelan: Not at all, and that's the frustrating thing is that we've said over and over, "Here's a rule set. Worst case scenario, you end up with the same solutions that you do today, but at least you've taken some steps to manage that day of execution through voluntary methods. But then if that doesn't work, your fallback is still to just go ahead and do the reassignment that you do today." But I feel like that keeps getting lost in that messaging, or they're not understanding the proposal, but then they don't ask questions to then get the clarification. And that's a big part of when merging documents and actually going line by line through language does help, but they haven't given us that opportunity to do that.
Amy Robinson: Are they making any moves that would limit their own flexibility?
Scott Plyler: We actually have made some progress in the reserve section. Release the check-in does limit some of their flexibility to reassign prior to check-in. We've added some additional language on getting released from deadheads in the reserve space that does limit their flexibility, but we've shown them over and over that they don't actually use that flexibility anyway, so it's not really so much of a give. When we get into the scheduling provisions, they've agreed to reduce the duty day for the middle day, the middle part of the day by one hour in scheduling, but still be able to reassign all the way up to essentially FAR max. And they're already doing that in their planned pairings anyway, so it's really not a move. They're doing what they're doing today, but not limiting the flexibility on the backend.
Dan O'Connor: And as a reminder, most fatigue calls data has shown are the result of reassignments. So not being willing to adjust the backend of the executed time limits really doesn't help you to mitigate the fatigue.
Kurt Heidemann: Feedback that we've gotten from some members when they talk about flexibility is they're concerned that we're going to put caps on our ability to fly extra or to fly more efficient pairings or longer pairings. Is that a concern as far as productivity versus protections, basically?
Meagan Nelan: They did all of this modeling of all of our 2020 asks, so like commutable pairings, a higher percentage of short pairings, the lower duty limits, all the things that kind of build that margin to buffer your schedule more. And then they compare that to CBA max, which right now they don't actually operate under CBA max, because they even realize that they need to mitigate those maxes to better protect the schedule. So it wasn't really a fair comparison of what they actually do today, which is a lot closer to what we propose. So it wasn't really a fair leap to say that we were going to cause this much more of a difference in that productivity, if that makes sense.
Dan O'Connor: And actually our proposals are just a little bit the opposite, Kurt. Like Meagan or Scott mentioned earlier, our proposals are when flying because uncovered that it is offered in open time, trying to solicit volunteers to fly that instead of just immediately go to reroute. So we are definitely not trying to cut down the amount of extra flying that pilots can pick up.
Meagan Nelan: Yeah. They presented data showing that they have thousands and thousands of pairings that go unbid on, but then we dug into it, because it just wasn't adding up to us. We have a healthy open time pickup rate, and it could actually even be better if they mitigated some of the reasons why people don't want to bid on open time. And we found hundreds of examples where it was actually an open time award, so it wasn't an example of something not being bid on. It's actually the opposite. And then we saw thousands of examples where it was insufficient time, so they created an open-time pairing and put it straight on a reserve so you didn't give a pilot an opportunity to bid. So I don't think that's a fair assessment of what's not being bid on.
Scott Plyler: That kind of goes to our whole point is that try to offer it. Certainly, if there's insufficient time, then you have to do something with it, and we all agree with that, but too often, we see things being rerouted 12 hours, 18 hours, 24 hours in advance, and it didn't run through open time, it didn't go through some process where a pilot could voluntarily have done that. And not only do you reroute one pilot, you tend to reroute tends to be a cascade as part of the solution. So now you're rerouting three or four, and we all know the solutions aren't really the best.
We were tracking a couple of years ago SkySolver, red, yellow and green flags for how long the duty days were, how short the overnights were, consecutive long duty days, and just raising some of the safety reg flags with it. Well, those are all worse now post pandemic, all of those things are happening more often now. It makes our language proposals in concept even more important for us to address, because again, just the record fatigue calls and just the pilot sentiment of how bad things are out on the line, it's demanding that something change here before something happens.
Dan O'Connor: They raise a concern, we won't have enough bidders for the open time. Well, sometimes you have to look for the reasons why people aren't bidding on these pairings too. When you start breaking it down, when almost half of those pairings weren't even fully rigged. Well, we have a proposal to that, fully rigged open time. Data has shown and polling has shown the pilots are afraid of rig absorption reassignments, that sort of thing. That's why we proposed LCO. So we did have a lot of proposals to mitigate some of the issues the pilots had with this open time and why they wouldn't want to bid it.
Amy Robinson: Okay, so we've heard a lot about data meetings, analytics, that kind of thing. Supposedly, you guys met with a SWA's analytics team. Did that help? Did it hurt? Are we getting closer in agreement about the data we're using?
Scott Plyler: Well, we're still looking at things fundamentally differently in a lot of ways, whether it's in the open time data or how things work in execution, whether pilots would pick things up. But a big thing we're still having issues with is just the level of analysis as well. Late change override is a really big one of them. Meagan's ran all the data on that, and maybe she could tell us more about that.
Meagan Nelan: Well, what we were hoping with the comparison, because we've been told over and over that we are just so far apart on our costing of what late change override would actually amount to. So I sent them, I said, "Okay, well here's all the April reassignments that we were tracking for purposes of costing late change override. Can we just get closer to an agreement on what that might be?" And instead they sent us over nine pairings, some of them were from September of '22, some were from October of '22. I think one was maybe from February of '23, so not even April comparison, which is what we were striving for. But what we found was they took those nine pairings, and they averaged out what the total LCO cost would've been for those, and then they multiplied it by the number of reassignments they were estimating for the last two years, I want to say, and that's how they came up with what they think it's going to cost.
The problem when you have just nine random pairings and you consider what those pairings are doing, one of those examples amounts to less than 1% of all your reassignments, like that example. That wasn't a good way to then go take those nine and weight them all equally as far as how often they happen. So it was a very high average compared to what we were estimating just for one month. So we had to ask, "Could you at least agree that costing 5,200 pairings is still going to be a better way to even average and extrapolate than just taking nine?" They acknowledged it, but then they haven't made any effort to do anything different, so we're never going to have the same costing.
Kurt Heidemann: And so how far off is that costing? If we're using 5,000 as our sample and they're using nine, how far off are we?
Scott Plyler: In order to do those 5,000, it wasn't every reassignment, but we filtered out some things that cause problems in pay audits, like auto-combines or sometimes a gate return or divert. And then we also didn't include reserve reassignments because those have a very different pay structure, and we're finding now that we have our reserve pay audit out and on the line, our reserve pilots are finding a lot more errors within the reserve pay audits than just regular line pairing audits. So we were trying to make sure we had a good baseline for what the pairing pays today before extrapolating that out for everything else. So we didn't include reserve, but when you see 20%, 22% of reassignments are on reserve pairings, okay, that would be a reasonable thing to extrapolate, add another 20%, 22% to our costing. But when you look over 5,000 pairings instead of nine, you're probably going to have a good beat on what the costing is for another 1,400 pairings.
Meagan Nelan: But then taking the costing, adding 20% to 22%, we still come up with about half, even less than half, of what they remodeling out. So it does make a big difference.
Kurt Heidemann: And so then just a quick plug for the SRC audit tool for reserve now. You're saying that's a new tool that's working out well for our pilots?
Scott Plyler: It is, but the other thing about late change override is when we proposed that and put it in our language for the contract 2020, we actually thought that would be kind of an industry-leading reassignment override. Delta now has that, Alaskan now has it, united and American also have it in their agreements that they're voting on right now. So now, it's actually become industry standard. So regardless of the costing, some version of late change override has to be in this contract just for us to be industry standard.
Kurt Heidemann: As long as we're talking about other airlines, in the room, they argue that we fly different type of operations, so we can't be as reliable or reassignments are harder or recovery is more difficult on the one hand. But on the other hand, because of that, they can't agree to some of the protections that the other carriers have. Discuss that. Dan, I know you do a lot with the contract comparison side of things.
Dan O'Connor: We don't disagree that our network is different. We are point-to-point, and they are more hub-and-spoke. So it is true sometimes with the recovery, it can be easier if they can just go ahead and cancel that turn. But we have proposed solutions, such as LRF and other point-to-point solutions for covering uncovered flying and disruptions.
Scott Plyler: Well, exactly what you're saying, Kurt. We get told in the room that because we do shoulder flying and we do basically what the regional feeders for the mainline carriers do that we can't have as many turns or two days, we can't have commutable pairings, we can't have shorter duty days, we can't have that in planning. But then on the flip side, because we have a point-to-point network, it's harder for us to recover, we can't guarantee that you're going to have a stable of a schedule. Even though it starts out worse than the other carriers, that just keeps getting even more worse because of our network. It gets really frustrating that how do we even get a ratifiable deal? How do we attract or even retain the current pilots we have when our own company is telling us that your schedules are going to be worse than other carriers, and then your online experience is also going to be worse than other carriers, and we're not doing anything to fix it. The answer's no.
Kurt Heidemann: Guys, as long as we have you here, one thing that I'd like to talk about is co-terminals because that's a proposal that the company made. It wasn't in our proposal, and it has tentacles. So first of all, describe what it is, why the company wants it, and what does it mean for our pilots?
Meagan Nelan: Co-terminal concept is essentially their ability to build pairings and lines out of a nearby station. So the part of that was Chicago Midway and O'Hare and then they had the Bay Area that was Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Houston Intercontinental. It would be their ability to originate and terminate a pairing at Intercontinental or at O'Hare. I think a big angst that we've been hearing is, "Oh, are they now going to be able to start me in Midway and end me in O'Hare? Are they going to be able to start me in Intercontinental and end me in Houston? So we've spent a lot of time talking through how can we do this in such a way that we still protect your online experience while also maybe gaining some of the benefits that that could allow? Maybe they could build more turns, maybe they could add some more commutability into the lines by having that ability to originate more pairings in domicile.
Scott Plyler: It certainly does have a lot of tentacles that also goes into reserve call out. "Well, how is that going to work? Are you going to be a reserve for one or multiple terminals? If that's the case, we need to have a much longer call out," which might be a good thing for our pilots in general if it applies to all bases. The other concern that we've also heard is that, "Well, if you do this co-terminal thing, yeah, you might be able to make some more commutable pairings, but is that going to come at a cost of opening new domiciles in geographically different places?" The company has been hinting and publicly talking about opening one or two new domiciles in the next year or so since March, April of this year, and yet we still haven't actually seen that happen. Our contention is that if you want to do co-terminals, you should probably be announcing these additional bases as well. All that, having more bases and co-terminals at the same time, would help us out in a lot of our contract 2020 asks and actually reduce the number of commuters as well.
Kurt Heidemann: And so do we have answers at this point? Can I start a pairing in Hobby and finish at Intercontinental? Will the company provide transportation between them? Do we know if they can reroute me back on an unscheduled trip back or anything like that?
Dan O'Connor: These are all great questions, Kurt, and that's part of the problem. They discussed the concept for about 30 minutes when we were in Orlando, and then they brought it up to us back in April in small group, just a couple of slides, just kind of, again, like Meagan said, a supposal, but they had very little language in their proposals about co-terminals. Like you brought up all those issues, Scott mentioned reserve, there's touches on ELIT, open time, where they're going to return you to if they reroute you. So these were not fleshed out, and that's part of a big problem with these. So we would obviously have to flesh these rules out to protect our pilots. One comment was made in the room that, "Well, we could just look how other airlines are doing that." "Well, we're not comfortable with that. We're not going to leave it that open, because we see that as an area where our pilots can be abused, so we need to protect them with contract language."
Kurt Heidemann: And so the high level position from the SRC for SWAPA on co-terminals, is it going to be harmful to our commuters or more advantageous to our in-domicile or don't we know?
Scott Plyler: Now, it needs to be advantageous to both. Otherwise, it's not something that we can really, really seriously consider, and that's why all these tentacles need to be addressed, and we need to have language on it, not just concepts, but language on it so that we know exactly what we're agreeing to. And if we can't get something that's advantageous to our pilots, both commuters and non-commuters, then the answer is going to be no.
Amy Robinson: We've seen a lot of negativity in what's coming forward in the negotiations so far. What would be an ideal situation for you guys to actually move forward and start finishing some of these things?
Dan O'Connor: Well, they need to approach the negotiations differently. They're coming into the room with an attitude of this is a tit-for-tat negotiation, a trading environment. That's not the environment we're in. Both sides need to realize that we need to write language that is ratifiable in this environment, and they don't seem to understand that at this point.
Scott Plyler: We have to have people in the room that can make decisions, that can understand the intent of what they're doing, specifically in the scheduling sections where they can see the breadth of how it goes from planning through the day of and the execution, how all of these things work together, because ultimately that's what's going to help our airline, and it's going to be a better experience for our pilots if you have pairings that are more favorable to what pilots are looking for and also aren't pushing the limits. And then also having boundaries and rules on what you can do with a pilot, once they get out online. That'll make things so much better. Whether it's open time pickup, cut down on your fatigue rates, just make the overall experience for our pilots a lot better. That is the common theme that we hear in all of our feedback is we need to have more certainty in our lives, we need to have better quality of life, and we're seeing that in a lot of the other airline contracts, and there's no reason why we can't have it here as well.
Amy Robinson: Thank you to Scott, Dan and Meagan for taking the time to talk with us today and giving us some insight from the committee at the table.
Kurt Heidemann: And as always, we want to hear from you. So if you have any feedback for us at all, please drop us a line at [email protected].
Amy Robinson: Finally, today's bonus number is 927. That's the total number of pilot fatigue calls made in the month of July. That's an all time record high and just, again, illustrates the need for a change in the way Southwest schedules our pilots. This is just one example of why the rewritten proposals are so important, and why we need to come to not just an agreement, but one that benefits both parties for the betterment of not just our pilots, but the airline as a whole.