10 (Executive Town Hall)

Today's SWAPA Number is 10. That's the number of subject matter experts and executives that were on the town hall that took place on July 28th. So for this episode, we are providing you an opportunity to hear that town hall in case you missed the live event, during which we posed questions ranging from SWAPA's relationship with the company to where we are with implementation to the status of our move through the strategic plan. It truly had so much in it that we felt it worthy of a second listen.

Four questions did not get addressed on air as we ran out of time and can be found below:

It seems there are many more 4 day trips and 4 day reserve blocks in elitt then ever before. I know there is a cap on the percentage of 4 days but it seems to be growing each month. What is causing this?

The number of 4-day pairings in the system has increased from ~18% to 20% of the pairing mix which is due to a multitude of reasons, but the increase in ELITT is a combination of vacation shifting to drop more, training bidding + a longer training footprint this year which can lead to two pairings being dropped on each side (whereas the last contract they optimized to the lowest cost/trip pull). Each category is unique, but the upgrade schedule this year has been aggressive so some bases see a full month of pulls to send Pilots to training.  In addition, Crew Planning has increased the number of blank lines which means more 4-day pairings get pulled from blank lines for the above reasons that then fall directly into MOT and ELITT opening.

How much does it cost to have the ELITT Red-Filter to actually work?

“Cost" may be difficult to pin down, but there will be additional filtering available across systems in CWA between now and ongoing modernization efforts.  Some of the disconnect right now is that there is the contractual definition of "red-eye" which encompasses flights that operate across 0200 domicile time, whereas there are "enterprise red-eyes" that launch after 0200 domicile time, so the CWA system doesn't flag those as "red-eye".  We've said multiple times that this is causing confusion and hopefully we'll make progress over time with additional filtering logic that will include all variations of red-eye operations.

If a SWAPA rep were to seek and be hired for a job at HQ SWA, would one open up at SWAPA? Do we have any language in our bylaws to prohibit this or anything planned?

Short answer: yes, a position would open up, but no, we don't have anything on the bo