112 (Scheduling and Analytics Committee, Meagan Nelan, Scott Plyler)

Today's SWAPA Number is 112. That's the average TFP per active pilot since contract ratification in January, 2024. Even with low density schedules and low levels of reroute, the new contract pay structure has boosted the 108 average TFP historically used. In fact, we had the second highest monthly TFP ever this past July, 135 TFP average, second only to the January, 2023, immediately post-meltdown average of 139 TFP.

It's been a whirlwind on the scheduling front this year with multiple implementation lifts that have had big impacts on how pilots plan and adjust their schedules. And with almost two years of the new CBA behind us, the Company appears to have made some adjustments of their own.  

So today we're across the table with our scheduling gurus, Meagan Nelan and Scott Plyler, to unpack some of the pain points, talk about some best practices, and look down the road for what's coming in 2026.

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Transcript

Tony Mulhare:

Today's SWAPA Number is 112. That's the average TFP per active pilot since contract ratification in January 2024. Even with low density schedules and low levels of reroute, the new contract pay structure has boosted the 108 average TFP historically used. In fact, we had the second-highest monthly TFP ever this past July. 135 TFP average, second only to the January 2023 immediately post-meltdown average of 139 TFP.

It's been a whirlwind on the scheduling front this year, with multiple implementation lifts that have had big impacts on how pilots plan and adjust their schedules. And with almost two years of the new CBA behind us, the company appears to have made some adjustments of their own.

Matt McCants:

So today we're across the table with our scheduling gurus, Meagan Nealon and Scott Plyler, to unpack some of the pain points, talk about some best practices and look down the road for what's coming in 2026.

Tony Mulhare:

I'm Tony Mulhare.

Matt McCants:

And I'm Matt McCants. And here's our discussion with Scott and Meagan.

So I don't know if we've had a year in which we've seen more changes in the scheduling world than this one. It seems like every week we have an update to the update to the implementation change or a manual workaround that then becomes an automated process. So I want to start by having you two give everyone a little bit of a peek behind the curtain of what it's been like for your team. What's a typical day, week, month look like for you guys?

Scott Plyler:

Well, we did see it was going to be a lot. This is the most scheduling changes we've had, probably over in two decades. We had it all done in the last 18 months, and there's still a little bit more to come. It was to the point we had to hire a couple more folks onto the scheduling committee just to help manage the workload.

To give you an idea of what scheduling analytics committee is, we've got six pilots, and one's full time, and we have three staffers. And we have major meetings, we have implementation meetings, and we have our ongoing daily processes. We have five meetings that we do every month. We do that with scheduling, Crew Planning.

We're part of the FSAG. We do IT implementation, and also we've started doing a lead ops scheduling as well, since that's a need. GIC is also part of that as part of our collaboration with the negotiating committee. So we have all those, and it's not just that you show up for the meetings, we prepare slide decks, recommendations, do data and analysis for it, and then there's follow up. So there's usually a meeting prior to each of those to set it up.

Matt McCants:

And quite a bit of testing too, right?

Scott Plyler:

And then you do an awful lot of just testing ideas, making sure that... And a lot of those things come from pilot feedback as well, so it's not like we don't, it's not coming from us in the room. It's, we get calls and emails. It comes from contract admin direct to us and we handle a lot of that.

Meagan Nelan:

What you're probably referencing is the CSS testing for the programming changes.

Matt McCants:

Right.

Meagan Nelan:

Everything Scott just covered. That's not even the implementation detail that we're in right now. We have weekly, sometimes bi-weekly meetings for all the different product lines that are associated with the implementation schedule. And that starts with going over user requirements, then having those regular meetings to discuss progress, and then once they're closer to implementing, that's when we go in and we make sure that everything was captured correctly.

I do a lot of that. Some of the committee guys help with that too, so just this week even we were in there looking at Reserve ELITT, making sure that it hit all the expectations and that it'll be ready to go next month.

Matt McCants:

Okay. Yeah, I think it's really important for the membership to see all the different things that you guys are involved with and the directions that your committee is constantly moving in. We have that bi-weekly internal report that comes around from all the committees that we send out to the execs and to the board. That's a laundry list of what's happening behind the scenes, and it's always really lengthy from you guys. And from our side in COM, it's one of the things that we're constantly trying to educate the membership on.

So let's kind of step through, chronologically, the implementations that took effect this year, the changes in scheduling and how those are going.

Scott Plyler:

Well, like we said earlier, it's definitely been an awful lot. It's also very validating to see a lot of these things that we were ideas in 2017, '18, that we did the SEP process that our pilots told us, "Yes, we want that or something similar," and we were able to achieve it, negotiations and it's finally coming to fruition. Some of it not totally perfect, but with progress and enhancements coming.

But yeah, just this year released a check-in as our answer to not doing long calling and creating an additional layer of inefficiency and more reserves. We got released to check in reserve voluntary double time to replace the system that schedulers weren't using, but where you call a pilot on reserve and ask them to extend, now we have as reserve double time. You just simply bid on it and then you can be awarded it.

Open time self-service. It doesn't seem like that great of a deal. Maybe only 50 to a hundred pilots are even eligible any given month, but this is the way you pull pairings out of the monthly open time inventory to recover your trip for pay. It'll become very important when we get to training bid, where your training bid will just be dropping trips with no pay, and then you can recover that with the OTP. ELITT, direct drop and direct pickup. That was huge. A lot of pilots didn't know why we didn't have that to begin with, but now we do ELITT across bid periods. That's another one that, maybe wasn't on a lot of people's radar during the SCP process, but it just helps people manage their schedule better. Why wouldn't you be able to do ELITT across all of the pairings that you have currently on your board? It also could help the company with a little bit of overlap correction as well.

Meagan Nelan:

That'll get better too, once the training bid calendar is going to shift another day. So the old contract ELITT open on the 25th, that's move to the 24th, it's going to creep up again to the 23rd with the training bid. So that's going to just further open up that across bid period window. Where you can shift things around.

Tony Mulhare:

And there's just been so much and if you're even from our perspective as we're trying to keep track of all these things as they're coming out, educate them while they're coming out. It is a lot for everyone on the line to understand all this and then think about how to apply it to your planning process.

So kudos to everybody for even trying some of these things out, not knowing exactly how well it's going to fit into what your goals are. Because everybody has a little bit different goals when it comes to scheduling, but what are you seeing as far as participation rates on your side of these new features? Has it been one of those things where a lot of people are sitting on the sidelines seeing how it works out, or are people diving in on it?

Scott Plyler:

Very popular, ELITT direct drop and pick up in the cross bid periods. Super popular. We didn't even mention it, but the vacation is shifting. That was an implementation last year, but it's done manually. But we do see a lot of that. I wish actually I saw a lot more of it. We see a lot more opportunity, especially for senior pilots, to take advantage of that and get even more time off, have better overlap corrections and still maintain a weekday schedule as well.

Tony Mulhare:

Right.

Meagan Nelan:

The trip trade and ELITT over vacation too, that actually got delivered two years early, which I don't think people really track that. It was an easy code change. So the company was able to do that fast and you see a lot of that activity.

Scott Plyler:

Shoot, even this past month we saw a lot of, they tried pay multiples in monthly open time for the first time.

Matt McCants:

Yep. Right. They did [inaudible 00:08:34].

Scott Plyler:

Not a perfect process, so they weren't ready for it automated, so they had to do a workaround for it, but who's going to say no to the company giving pilots more money? So we found a way to make that work, even though there was a couple little kinks in it with the open time priority process as well.

Meagan Nelan:

It serves the purpose though, is mitigating any potential schedule issues when you have a lot of uncovered flying. That's the whole idea of pay multiples in monthly overtime.

Matt McCants:

Right. So the company actually saw a pretty good benefit from that as well, right?

Scott Plyler:

Yeah, absolutely worked.

Meagan Nelan:

It's a win-win.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah, I think that's worth hammering home a little bit here, is that all of these changes in our scheduling rules, the new features, have they turned this operation into a little bit more efficient, a little less problems? Prior to Contract 2020, we saw so many reroutes, so many JAs, can we point just quite a few.

Matt McCants:

Deadheading all over the country.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah, deadheading everywhere to do something that clearly could have been done by somebody else. Can we kind of point to a number of these things and say, "Hey, this is helping the operation itself run better."

Scott Plyler:

Clearly the leg change override and the additional cost associated with that has created a lot of changes.

Tony Mulhare:

Some behavior changes. Yeah.

Scott Plyler:

Behavior changes for sure. Plus we have some other structural changes. We have the POT before reserve and before split to cover. Now you almost never see split to cover, which created so much-

Tony Mulhare:

Huge [inaudible 00:10:02]. Yeah.

Scott Plyler:

... Extra duty periods and deadheads and just reserves just getting routed over. Now reserves tend to get full pairings, and then you get routed online due to real online issues, not because of the scheduling management. Those things have really, really helped out a lot.

The company is still trying to figure out how to manage all of these changes. So we hear constantly in our meetings about cost this cost that, the cost of everything. So they're still trying to figure out how to manage all of it.

Matt McCants:

So that kind of talks about where we've been, but we have several things coming up in the next couple of months, like deadhead self-release and then Reserve VLITT. You guys want to talk about those for a minute?

Meagan Nelan:

Well, deadhead self-release is coming to CrewHub December 2nd. And I believe the company will be putting out and on the radar. I think that drops today, so it should be out when this podcast goes out. Self-explanatory. Cuts down on those phone calls to scheduling. So again, anytime we were able to see opportunities to create a win for crew scheduling and a win for the pilots, there's a lot of alignment opportunities there. This was one of them.

Matt McCants:

And so release a check-in. Is that just going to simply be something I can click on in CWA?

Meagan Nelan:

Exactly. So if your pairing begins with a deadhead, say your commuter, you can go in up to 24 hours prior and self-release. So no need to make that phone call. And then on the back end, especially on a busy day in scheduling where there's long hold times, if you're 30 minutes past your block in and you still haven't been able to get ahold of them, you can just self-release.

Tony Mulhare:

Okay, and that's on CrewHub, on your EFB or on your mobile device or both? What's it looking like?

Meagan Nelan:

Anywhere you have CrewHub downloaded.

Tony Mulhare:

Okay.

Meagan Nelan:

It's within CrewHub only. Yes.

Tony Mulhare:

And then reserve VLIT. I think, I think this is one of the biggest game changers to add some flexibility to our reserve pilot. So let's talk about reserve VLIT a little bit.

Scott Plyler:

Yeah, reserve VLIT definitely a new one and using a slightly different metric than what the pairing ELITT does.

Tony Mulhare:

Right.

Scott Plyler:

Using a blocks to cover. So it's looking at the number of reserve blocks starting on any given day. Just want to make sure everybody understands that there is that difference. There are a couple limitations. You can't go below one AM or one PM and eventually one red eye. So if you're the last one on an AM reserve block starting that day, then you're going to be keeping it. There are some metrics as well, based on the percentage of hard line reserve blocks starting on that given day, that if it's a weekend they need more reserve coverage.

So if they have more blocks in the monthly bid lines, then that's going to create a metric where you can't trade below that number of blocks, but that counts all blocks; red eye, PM, AM, reserve blocks, starting on any given day. So there is opportunity even just to switch between AM and PM on the same day, even if it's red, so to speak.

Tony Mulhare:

Interesting. So if you have a red day with a block to cover, but you're on an AM reserve pairing and you want to an AM wrap and you want to switch it to a PM wrap, you'll be able to do that?

Scott Plyler:

You'd be able to do that so long as you still have at least one AM or one PM.

Meagan Nelan:

You just can't be the last reserve for that bucket. Yeah.

Tony Mulhare:

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, I think this is kind of a misunderstood concept, DTC and blocks to cover, now with Reserve ELITT. So let's refresh everybody about what those are and what the expectations then become. From the bid letter. The front sheet talks about what you can expect for DTC in the upcoming month, and that will probably be the same for Reserve ELITT, right? We'll see what kind of blocks to cover here. So help frame this for folks and set some expectations. I do think this is one of those things that isn't quite well understood.

Scott Plyler:

Well, it is a separate application within CWA, so it's not one combined reserve and pairing ELITT, it's actually its own separate application, so you would have to trade reserve blocks separate from pairings.

We did have a vision to do that in, for Contract 2020, but combining the two concepts just it became too much change management and we didn't want to wind up with metrics that didn't work that made things actually worse. So we wanted to at least get the Reserve ELITT into the contract, get it going, see how it works, and then the next contract that can all get refined in a way that benefits both pilots and the company.

Meagan Nelan:

And I'll say some other carriers, they do use reserve coverage to then assess your ability to make trades and drops on pairings. And that's not always a good thing. You can actually end up with things being more restricted than what we have today with the duties to cover and net-zero process. So for this airline, I think it makes sense for them to be separate

Scott Plyler:

And with all the changes that we made, whether it's pot before reserve and getting rid to split the cover, it was really hard to model out how everything was going to change and how reserves get utilized, and then know what that model should be.

The good news is that they have started to pull back on the amount of reserves in the hard lines. We were up over 20% of the hard lines were reserves, and now we're down into the 15 and 16% again.

Tony Mulhare:

Which is kind of substantial.

Scott Plyler:

It's quite a bit. They're seeing a lot of the ideas that we kept presenting that "Hey, this is going to lower your reserve coverage needs." It's actually coming into fruition. So they may have a lot of extra cost in the premium before reserve, but they're also saving by not having the reserves to begin with.

Tony Mulhare:

A hundred percent. And again, more to the expectations here, you're probably not going to, if you're someone who's on weekend reserve for the entire month, we're not saying that Reserve ELITT is probably going to open up the ability for you to ELITT out of all those reserve pairings into weekday PM reserve pairings, but there could be some opportunities for that over the course of the month and then as the month goes along. True?

Meagan Nelan:

Just like regular ELITT, it'll probably be very competitive when it opens on any excess inventory on that weekend getting traded out of. So unless you happen to be the lucky one that processes it first, you're probably just going to be making little quality of life adjustments of, maybe moving a Saturday to a Friday or moving a four, a four wrap block to a three and then picking up another on another day.

But it is still, you got to start somewhere and getting them to agree to this new system in itself is a win, and then you can continue to iterate in future contracts to further improve how that system works.

Matt McCants:

Well, I think this and combined with some of the other things like RPP and release a check, and it's been a complete sea change from what reserve used to be, which was something you had to suffer through for your first year or so, maybe two here at Southwest, before you could get aligned and actually start being flexible with your schedule. But all of those things combined each an incremental increase in your quality of life now makes reserve way more attractive. And so I'm assuming you're starting to see that go more senior than it used to?

Scott Plyler:

Oh, absolutely. It's definitely gone a lot more senior, even during the summer you've seen that as well because there is more opportunity for you to control your schedule, and people do want to pick it up.

Meagan Nelan:

And then another important call out, just like with regular ELITT, you can directly pick up, you'll be able to do the same thing with Reserve ELITT, whereas going into February how they would sometimes delete the reserve blocks out of open time, so you couldn't bid at them at all. You can just direct pick up. So some of those low months, it's probably not a bad idea to pick up a block and see if you get used.

Scott Plyler:

We did get rid of that in this contract, where they can't pull them out of open time. They have to keep them in the ELITT, the Reserve ELITT inventory, all the way up until that umber passes and they would go into DOT. That's when they can make the decision to take them out of inventory. So the game here would be to pick them up.

Matt McCants:

Because they could be smaller blocks, right? Because you're talking about things, chunks of reserve blocks that are left over maybe a two-day or even, would they have to keep a single-day wrap?

Meagan Nelan:

They do, yes.

Matt McCants:

And so those things you could pick up and then like you said, they don't have to put them in open time, but they have to be there in the initial reserve.

Scott Plyler:

That brings up another good point. This is blocks to cover. So you can trade a two-day, a two wrap block for a four wrap block, and you trade a four wrap block for a two wrap block. There is no, you don't have to trade same length for same length, it's just block for block. But the total result of the transaction needs to be the same or more wraps on your board.

Tony Mulhare:

There could be a lot of two-step moves here that could land you in a wildly different reserve schedule if that's your end goal. And we're talking a lot about tactics here, and just to reach some folks in on something that's going on behind the scenes that we're working with some of your counterparts in the SAC, is we're working on some advanced scheduling techniques. We know it's been a lot going on out there, so we're trying to consolidate once we have everything on the table. Like, "Okay, here's some best practices about how you can do any number of these things." And obviously the scheduling handbooks great resource for this too.

Meagan Nelan:

Well, the training bit's going to be a paradigm shift for sure. Then you'll have the ability to conflict bid your line. So that'll be something that we'll probably want to work with the committee and put out advanced techniques and practices.

Tony Mulhare:

Yup. Right.

Scott Plyler:

This all works together, but yeah, it's coming out bits and pieces, and once you see the whole package, we have to remind the company of this as well. It's like you don't have the full package together to see, so if you're worried about too much premium or too much VET, or whatever your cost things is, they have to remember we haven't implemented everything yet.

Tony Mulhare:

Right. How about footprint protection? That's a new concept here. Let's get into the details of that a little bit.

Meagan Nelan:

Yeah, it's important to know what it is and what it isn't. And to also understand where we were coming from when we initially tried to lay out some reassignment rules.

Footprint protection was not the original proposal. We were wanting to mitigate the silly reroute like you mentioned earlier, you're deadheading all over. We didn't quite achieve that with footprint protection.

So to be clear, the whole concept here is they have to abide what your original release time was on your assignment. So the goal is, if you were supposed to be back in base at 1600, they're going to get you back in base by 1600 unless, and then there's a few exceptions, like you had a cancellation, there's no way to get you back. You got to misconnect, there's no way to get you back.

But it's a requirement Now that didn't exist in the last contract. We lost several arbitrations about reroute behavior, because the contract was vague. Now we have very clear expectations. You either have the preference that they're going to get you back on time, or the alternative is what we call, "same day," meaning they're going to return you on the same domicile day, but then that can set you up for potentially getting a hundred percent LCO if they exceed your original release time.

Matt McCants:

So it just kind of depends on what your priorities are-

Meagan Nelan:

Right.

Matt McCants:

... For a pilot is what you would select, right, whether you're looking for maybe a quality of life versus, I'm open to whatever so I can get that LCO.

Scott Plyler:

Yeah, this had all originally started. I want to give a shout-out to Bill Winans. He was on our committee several years ago and this started out with a whole lot of preferences. "I want my same overnight." "I don't want to be rerouted at all." "I don't mind getting JA'd another day." It started out with all of these and it was basically the, don't eff with me preferences. And I just want to give a shout out to him that this isn't exactly what we set out to do, but it gets us in the right direction and then we can build off of this going into the next contract.

Matt McCants:

So I think another concept that we've been talking about for a while that's about to be implemented that again needs some more discussion is something like personal net-zero.

Scott Plyler:

This was a concept, again brought out with all the JA's that we had in 2021 and '22. Not just JA's, but the, even more so the unscheduled overnight JA's, which is what the majority of the JA's are. We consolidated that, both of those are JA's in this current contract. There's no distinction there.

What the personal net-zero does besides getting the double time pay for the JA duty periods, you've lost a day off. We made that point at a board meeting with Bob Jordan I think in 2022 about pilots lost over 10,000 days off in 2022 due to JA's. This is a way for you to not just get paid for it and patted on the head, but you're able to recoup some of your lost time with your family or whatever you wanted to do.

So personal net-zero for every day that you get a JA, you would get a personal net-zero that goes into a bank. You can bank up to four of them for use within ELITT and this is a way to bypass the net-zero. So if you have a four-day trip and you have four PNZ's, you can trade down four duty periods regardless of what the net-zero is. There are still the duties to cover limit, but this is a way to get your time back.

These personal net-zeros would be good for six months. There'll be an expiration date on it, six months from the day that you got JA'd, and you can stack these all up.

They are a little bit delayed on the programming though it was supposed to be by January. The programming will be in place by the middle of February, end of February. But, as part of the doing a manual workaround for this, you will start accruing PNZ.

Tony Mulhare:

Okay. Accrual first.

Scott Plyler:

Starting January 1st. So any JA's January 1st on, you will start accruing them, and then once it becomes active in ELITT, they will make the expiration date six months from the day it goes active. So if you have them to get JA'd on January 1st, but they don't implement this till March 1st, you'll have six months from March 1st to use those PNZs.

Tony Mulhare:

Got it.

Scott Plyler:

The other part of the PNZ is that you can also use it even though you can't trade down technically there is no technical trade down in Reserve ELITT, though it's block for block. You can get a reserve day pulled, a reserve wrap pulled using a PNZ via a phone call to scheduling.

Tony Mulhare:

Okay.

Meagan Nelan:

Which that wasn't a new concept. The last contract you could drop a wrap up first or last day of a block. This just extends your opportunity. You had to do it by the end of the month I believe, or if it was your last block you could do the following month, but now you got a six-month window to utilize that. So it improves what was in the last contract for reserves.

Tony Mulhare:

Cool. And I think rounding out our coming soon or coming attractions if you will, is the training move up preference.

Scott Plyler:

Well, this comes from, they have to shift some of where they do the training just to match where they have instructors.

Tony Mulhare:

Sure.

Scott Plyler:

And check airmen prepare their capacity for new hires and upgrade later in the year. So the move up preference, you do this via a form on your EFB, on their training preferences and you just say, "Hey, I want to be moved up a month," or, "I want to be moved up more than three months," or, "I don't want to be moved up." And they'll take volunteers first instead of just grabbing people randomly. They'll take the volunteers first, and then after that, if they have to involuntarily move folks up, they start a counter for your involuntary move ups. And if you have more than one in the same seat, then you start getting additional time off. You get a PNZ. You also get paid an override as well.

Meagan Nelan:

Which, it's timely right now because the company did recently put out CALM that they are intending to do move up starting with January CQT, which I believe they're pulling those forms today for anybody who wants to voluntarily move up. But I will say we were told yesterday a total of 12 people submitted, so it's not, I don't know if it's not out there enough.

Tony Mulhare:

You're telling me, a lot of people don't want to do training in January. That's interesting.

Matt McCants:

Okay.

Meagan Nelan:

Yeah.

Matt McCants:

All right, so that rounds out fourth quarter and we'll look into the first quarter of next year with some things being implemented in January and February, but that still leaves two very large pieces of the puzzle that still need to be implemented and those would be the training bid and the reserve proffer process. So our disclaimer here is we'll have a lot more education on these topics as we get closer, but let's set the table for what these are going to look like.

Meagan Nelan:

Well, the proffer process is coming first, so the timeline right now is that we'll launch on January 31st, so pilots will be able to proffer for February 1st open time.

Matt McCants:

Okay.

Meagan Nelan:

There's also, we introduce it in the November reporting point, so if anybody wants just a little snapshot of what the interface is going to look like, it'll be very similar to open time.

The pilot side of it is actually quite simple. You're going to have two buckets similar to straight and premium open time, but it's going to be non-conforming. So that would be anything that just doesn't fit an AM or PM wrap that gives... International's a good example, reports a little early, releases a little bit late where you could put in a proffer for it and even if you wouldn't have been legal, you can be awarded it through that proffer process.

Conforming would just be if you're an AM reserve, you're proffering for AM hearings and it'll then pull you from the RCO. It's a seniority based award in your bucket. So four days in seniority order. That part's simple. It's the back end part on how schedulers are assessing your proffer. That's gotten a bit convoluted.

When we had initially proposed this and kind of whiteboarded it in mediation, it was supposed to be what we called prepot a decade ago in crew scheduling. It was like a mock award to see what's going to go premium. So then you would know what needs to go to reserves, and we thought that it would be a very similar thing of doing a mock award and seeing what's got proffers and what's got premium bids.

Sounds like it's going to be a little bit more manual at the very get-go. Schedules will have the ability to look at what's being proffered and what's being awarded premium. Do an assessment, run a report, see the outcome, make adjustments, rerun the report and then assign these things manually.

So we do have some concerns. This was supposed to speed up the open time process and I think initially when everybody's learning how to work with this new interface, it'll probably slow things down. So we're having pretty regular conversations talking through scenarios, and then there'll be a lot of testing required of running a big open time close and seeing how long it takes to assess.

Matt McCants:

So initially we just might see the release of the 0900 DOT time might not be as quick as we're used to seeing. It might be a bit delayed.

Meagan Nelan:

Contractually, they're supposed to have things done by 12 o'clock central time. And I don't see it pushing past that. We'd have some serious concerns at that point because you have a 1300 close right after that. But I do think that at least those first couple of weeks, if you're accustomed to things being done by say 10:30, it might be pushing a little bit later than that. Again, it just depends on how much open time they're managing.

Matt McCants:

Okay. I think all this is good about setting expectations. It's a new process from the pilot side. We want it and we want it right now.

Meagan Nelan:

And work is going to continue. So eventually that will be more streamlined as far as how premium and proffering get solved together. It's just in order to get this out the door, we're having to make some compromises.

Scott Plyler:

Mostly compromises on the company's side and increased scheduling. This is going to wind up... We didn't intend this to be more work for schedulers. That's why we wanted there to be an optimizer. Figuring out the proffers versus POT and they don't have that yet, so this will be a manual process for them, so pretty tough.

But on the pilot side, this doesn't change anything about who gets called out. I mean you're still going, if there's three free days, they're going to take the first three day, the first three pilots with three days of reserve, and then they're going to look at your proffers. There are some sorts, based on whether you're legal for things, maybe in an ETOPS space you're looking at somebody who's ETOPS qualified versus not, or somebody has a legal, like a 28-day legality. There might be some issues there where things get sorted out of order, but that's kind of the way it works now.

But the whole idea is that you have more of a say by seniority within who's getting called out. They're not going to, they get to choose via their proffer what they get to fly. But they're not going to go out of RCO order if you're the most senior guy but you're number five on the list.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah, that's the point to hammer home.

Scott Plyler:

They're not going to pull you out. They're not going to assign you just because you have a proffer. If you're not supposed to be going because you're way down on the RCO list, then you're not the one that's going to go.

Meagan Nelan:

Well and you can manage that a little bit too with your pass and fly preference. If there's something and you want to push yourself further up, use your preference to the best ability that you can to then be the guy that gets tagged in that round of open time to be assigned what you proffered for. But the marching orders back then from that SCP process of the last round was to insert seniority into the reserve assignment system and this is what this is accomplishing.

Matt McCants:

And I think it is important to go back to your previous point, Scott, that one of the things that you guys have done in the SAC as part of this process is defense seniority, which is, because if I remember correctly as we talked about this process last summer and why it was being delayed, is some of the things they were trying to implement on the scheduling side, on the company side, were actually going to result in things being awarded out of seniority order. And we had to defend that and make sure that this process allowed for preferences but still defended your seniority.

Scott Plyler:

That was when there was discussions about, it was due actually due at the end of June this year, but they didn't have the programming set up on either side, pilot or scheduler side, and they were trying to find a way to do a manual workaround and yes, that was part of why the delay made a lot more sense was to make sure that we had the provisions that the pilots needed, which was the seniority part of the proffering.

Matt McCants:

Yeah.

Tony Mulhare:

Okay. I think that beats reserve proffer process to death pretty well. If you want to get ahead of the game, there is a presentation by Dan O'Connor that we put out there during the TA education period that still lives on the NC's page, so if you want to check that out, feel free, but again, we're going to have more education about this coming up. But that turns a corner into training bit. So this was a big ask for Contract 2020. Where are we sitting right now with that? What's it going to look like? How are we feeling about it?

Scott Plyler:

Well, there will be a training bid, and the training that affects more than just the training bid, it's also tied to the whole monthly timeline, which allows monthly open time and ELITT to close and be started a day earlier as well. It also has that change where you're not doing quality of life polls versus max pay. It's just you bid for it and that's what you get, and then anything that conflicts is going to be pulled off of your schedule at no pay, but then you have the opportunity to go into open time priority and pick up. Pick up if you wish or if you don't wish and you want to have that time open and available to do your personal business or pick up open time, you can do that as well.

Meagan Nelan:

It warrants reminding everybody of why SWAPA was in the position to have to go ahead and agree that this needs to be delayed to give the pilots the product that they're expecting. There's two things here. If y'all recall, there was a reduction in force in February, I believe earlier this year, and there were product owners who were let go. And say what you want about people's retirement plans, but certain people left Southwest voluntarily following that.

Well, one of those individuals who retired, she had been the oversight of a usability study that was done. We had some of our board members participate in that, committee members just other line pilots, and everybody was in agreement of what this system needed. She leaves and that usability study felt like it just kind of got set aside of, "Okay, well that was good information, but this is how we're going to proceed," which was less than what the standard was agreed to with that.

The other piece of this is to that whole conflict resolution for bidding against your line, there was additional programming that wasn't accounted for. And I think some of that's just the silos that exist today. If you have lead ops, you have Flight Ops product owners, you have crew scheduling product owners, and through that whole kerfuffle there was just information that was missed and we were asking for user requirements. And sometimes it's hard for somebody to just own a system not wholly under one work group.

So that caused the delay and then the usability study caused the delay, and so that's where we're at now where it's going to be launched in March for April CQT bidding, but it's not going to meet, again, the standard that we were hoping to achieve from that usability study either.

Scott Plyler:

The whole reason they did the usability study is because the SAC members on the training bid and award team were trying to tell the product owners that, "No, you need to have this capability. You need to have this filter and sorting capability. You need to have," they used a WBID and a crew bid as examples of what pilots actually expect to be able to do with a bid for filtering and sorting, and they didn't quite believe that it really needed to be that. And then they did the usability study, and that confirmed everything that our pilots were saying, that it wasn't that we were asking for the moon, we were just asking for a truly viable product, not a minimum viable product. We didn't want this to be another electronic bidding system that nobody uses, because the problem is there is no third-party software that's going to be doing the training bid. This has to be, this had to be correct.

Matt McCants:

So the bad news is, well, the good news is we're getting this. The bad news is we're probably not going to be real happy with the initial product, but then the rest of the good news is we're going to be continuing to work on this product. Is that correct?

Scott Plyler:

The news is that for the bidding, that'll be done for the April and May CQT will have a limited sorting capability. It won't be as robust as we were intending to have. However, the additional programming, the enhancements to that are being programmed, they are due, and they should be in place by the June bidding. And then there is additional enhancements coming after that to make this a full and complete viable product, that it's not just a, "Here it is, it's done. Good luck with it."

We have let, not just Flight Ops leadership know, let training leadership know, even Crew Planning and scheduling needs to know, that a product that isn't fully capable of what pilots are expecting can probably create... Not probably, it will create some additional challenges in covering training and there is going to be a lot of discussion about this.

Meagan Nelan:

I'll also, I want to clarify that this is the best information we have as of today. There's going to be an additional meeting, I think that first week of December, on this is actually what the final product is. So that's not to say that people aren't still working behind the scenes to see what else we could possibly get into that initial launch.

So hopefully we can have better news based on what we know today versus what you will see at that initial launch. The other piece of it is there'll be a standing bid too. And we're still doing our own assessment of this, but the standing bid may actually be a better outcome than the standard bid as far as how you prioritize the ranks of what days you want to go to training and what sims you need. So we're we're going to spend a lot of time on the education there and make sure that pilots have what they need to then navigate that decision.

Tony Mulhare:

Yeah, okay. I think that's a good place to step back from the details of what's coming near term and a little bit further down the road. And it sounds like, and I think for most folks who've been following all these things going along, kind of in a mixed bag, kind like a mixed grade sheet of how all of our different implementation measures have gone. And there's some "why" behind some of these things. Like in certain cases we get things early, there's a why behind that. In other cases, things have been a little bit late. So from where you're sitting, what's the why behind the different story arcs here, in success of a lot of these new measures that we're putting together here?

Scott Plyler:

Really a big why, is that doing an assessment of what programming and what level of tech capacity is going to be required to get these things done. It's very difficult to do that in less than a month. At the very end of negotiations to get a proper implementation plan into place.

Tony Mulhare:

Okay.

Scott Plyler:

It leads to there needs to be more of a tech, this was a super tech heavy contract on our scheduling side. I don't think the next ones will be quite as bad, but you do need to have actual tech people in the room as you're agreeing to things making, and actually starting to make requirements before you get the contract signed. That way you have a much better idea of what the implementation plan will be.

And that was discussed extensively during the end game of negotiations. That's why the implementation MOU has some flexibility in there. That's why you tend to give grace when you need more time to get something done, because we all want it done correctly, not just to meet a deadline. We don't want a wasted product.

Meagan Nelan:

Well, and then as a reminder, the initial proposal that the company came back with on that implementation timeline was much longer than what we got to in the final agreement. We put a lot of pressure for them to move things up.

The other missing piece here is, we made some assumptions that the last contract was fully implemented from a technology standpoint, and as we were getting into the weeds of some of the user requirements, we realized, "Oh, that wasn't programmed." Some of this red-eye stuff was never programmed.

So now you have to add that back to your tech capacity where we had all thought that that was, check that box, it's already been done. "Oh, now we need to fit that into these roadmaps." And so how do you move things around where we had timelines and agreements in place, but then you launch red-eye almost two years earlier than we thought we would see it. So now you got to start moving things around.

Matt McCants:

Yeah. So that then leads to further implementation items that are a little longer range that touch red-eye, like your red-eye reserve and some of those things that are still outstanding in the later half of 2026, right?

Scott Plyler:

Yeah. I do want to add though that a big part of doing that implementation plan and the discussions at the end of negotiation was having SWAPA participation and having us, not embedded, but certainly collaborating. And there are some products that we're not happy with how they're going to wind up rolling out initially, but then they're eventually coming around. We've had some where they've come out slightly imperfectly, like ELITT across bid periods. We have some out of category issues, but those are being worked on.

And we've been able to identify things early on in the requirements that have saved a lot of headache, launching something that wasn't right. And then we've been able to do a lot of testing in the lab, and we know, okay, is this acceptable? Could we launch with this knowing that has some of these or defects knowing they're going to be fixed, is there a benefit to the pilot group?

So, having that collaboration and being, working with the programmers, that's actually worked out very, very well. It's been actually amazing to see how much work they've gotten done and how much they've been over backwards trying to listen to what our inputs are, and they do appreciate the inputs. It's just that middle level, sometimes the people making decisions on what the requirements actually need to be or not. They're not pilots, they're not the people that are going to use it and sometimes that doesn't work out and we've got what, 10 different product lines running right now. So everyone has a different personality about how they do things as well.

Matt McCants:

Sure.

Meagan Nelan:

Well, and that just reminded me of how far we've come. So to kind of give some background to when we did the 2016 contract, I was invited in to help test on some of the changes, nothing compared to what we're doing now. But I found an issue and this was, I believe, Siccic Rule on premium awards.

And I highlighted the concern and I got disinvited from ever joining them again on-

Tony Mulhare:

Way to go, Meagan.

Meagan Nelan:

... Implementation testing. So nowadays, if I find an issue, instead of being told don't come back, we actually have conversations about contractual intent and then how to fix it before it goes live so that we don't end up with a grievance, which is, we ended up with a grievance last time.

So I think there's also just more trust built into this whole back and forth of rather than them being on guard about an issue, we go ahead and address it and then that's going to save our contract admin team two years of arbitration work from now, arguing it.

Tony Mulhare:

Right. Okay. One more seeing the matrix question here. We're two years into this deal with major changes in shaping the schedule and we talked a little bit about this with economics and financial analysis about, here are the company goals, we are out trying to maximize revenue in the operation. To the layman, it kind of seems like now they're shaping the schedules to do that and that makes sense. Form kind of follows function, right? As a result. It seems like at least in certain places the line quality has suffered and everybody has different definitions for that.

But what does it look like as the people who can see the matrix, is that kind of a fair assessment that company has kind of adjusted fires now that they have these guardrails and boundaries with the new scheduling rules and parameters, and this is kind of what they're producing. Do you think that's a fair assessment?

Scott Plyler:

Well, as we said a little bit earlier, it still seems like they're trying to adjust to the new contract and how things are actually working. We've seen the reduction in the number of reserves, which was something that we were pushing. We've been pushing for a decade, and so that's good to see.

As far as the line quality goes, we have new parameters in our contract on a lot of things, whether it's duty days, minimum numbers of turns, and two days, minimum numbers of commutable pairings, how those get put together, lower average pairing length. Those things do have a cost on the company side, whether it's creating an aircraft change or a deadhead in order to make those things happen.

Our network is not like other airlines. We don't have a hub and spoke. It doesn't make turns naturally. We do see more opportunity for there to be more turns, but just the way the optimizer has been programmed in the past, we still think that there is more opportunity for them to reprogram the optimizer and all the parameters in there.

Even in our monthly meetings with Crew Planning, we're trying to get into, well, what are the weights and costs and constraints that you're using now? Do they even make sense anymore with this new contract? What we've seen, and we've had a couple of articles about this, is that currently it's creating pairings with our duty days that are less dense, less TFP per duty day. You can say that that's part of the new contract did that. We limited the duty days, but we actually limited the duty days to higher than what they were programming, most of them, to before we had this new contract.

What we were trying to do was prevent it from in the future from getting out of hand. So we were trying to lock in basically where they were at. The problem is now we have additional buffers being programmed into that from the planning side, whether it's to mitigate Florida storms, they have an extra duty day, they limit the duty day because they know you're going to get delayed there. They limit the duty day going de-icing stations, going through international stations.

And so, the cumulative effect of them using the new duty day limits plus adding additional buffers onto it is causing a little bit of issue. And I think there's still room for improvement there by using their new analytics team to analyze how the execution goes. Some of the buffers that they're using are working, they're helping, so that you don't get rerouted and that prevents LCO. That's a good cost savings, but is that worth not having, is not having some level of reassignments worth having lines that aren't as productive.

Meagan Nelan:

The only other thing I want to call out here is, you can't really compare 2018 to today when it comes to pairing construction, because the way they run the network schedule is significantly different. So you have significant dips on Tuesdays and Wednesdays now, whereas in the past, the daily schedule pretty much repeated itself. So it made it real easy from a crew construction standpoint.

But when you have significant dips in the middle of the week, how do you connect these pairings? And I think that's actually a bigger issue in terms of why the density is down. Because as Scott said, our Contract 2020 asks from a duty standpoint, they were already optimizing to that, so they just never optimized to the maxes of the last contract, because they knew that wasn't smart from a pairing-breakage standpoint. So we were just securing that additional mitigation that they already knew that they needed.

And so when they go into a cost saving frame like now, they would've been maxing things out. I believe they're doing that to the flight attendants a little bit more now, because their contract just didn't have the same protections that we were able to secure. I think it's more about the network construction than it is anything else.

Tony Mulhare:

So to characterize this and kind summarize these big strategic moves that the company wants to do, which then affects the network, has this trickle-down effect which has perhaps had some unintended consequences. But you guys are still trying to present solutions along the way to take into account the feedback that you get and that we see. Fair?

Scott Plyler:

That's fair. I mean you can see that, just the red eyes is probably a prime example of how they are making money for the company, which is a good thing for all of us. But they wanted it done right away. Well, our implementation plan did not have red eye reserve into it until next summer. So you're going to... And we've also uncovered a lot of other 24 hour ops issues, whether it's Southwest day, domicile day, calendar day, a lot of issues related to doing the red eyes as we've been going along here.

But they started building red eyes before we were really ready from a scheduling standpoint to actually do them. That's why all of the red eyes right now are being built out of East Coast bases and some out of the Central Time Zone bases, but it's all out of the east coast bases because we don't have a reserve capable of flying a red eye as a first leg of a pairing. So they're building PM pairings with the red eyes as the last leg.

That costs a lot of money the way they're building them because average daily guarantee that tax on, you do two duty periods with three ADG, or three duty periods now with four days of ADG, that costs a lot of extra money. That's not our contract's fault, that's not our pilots' fault. That's the company wanted red eyes and they weren't prepared to do them.

Once we do see red eye reserves, we'll probably see... That was the other thing. Because of that, you have such a demand for flying on the East Coast. That's part of why you saw a big shift of manning to the East Coast as well and why it's a significant part of the displacements that we've seen. We're up to over 300 now, right?

Meagan Nelan:

350.

Scott Plyler:

So we're going to see some of that mitigate back as they get read our reserve implemented in summer of 2026, and they can start building these red eye pairings from the West Coast. It'll also be more efficient for the company to do them as well. We probably won't see quite as good a deal with them either.

But again, it just shows that those network changes don't necessarily line up with how the contract works, but hey, we have a contract for a reason. That's to protect our pilots and make sure we get paid correctly for our services. But sometimes that doesn't match up with what the company wants to do.

Matt McCants:

So if I'm correct, we have the most displaced pilots than we've ever had in our history here at Southwest. And that's certainly a hot topic for those pilots. What can you tell them about what their opportunity to get back to their preferred domicile in the next couple of months?

Scott Plyler:

Well, the first part of it is, that you probably have all heard, Crew Planning put out a video two months ago basically, basically announcing a new base without announcing a new base, showing vacancy of movement with all negative numbers. And that has to go somewhere. There is a new base on the docket for 2026, it hasn't been announced yet. We do expect that to be announced before the end of the year. Hopefully they listen to this podcast and they do it right after that.

Meagan Nelan:

And they look at demographics and we share that kind of data back and forth on where do your pilots live. They're also be looking at where the flight attendants live, and use that as part of their accounting on where they're going to open a new base.

Scott Plyler:

So because of that, we would expect that some of the displacements will be returned to where they would like to be, or they'll wind up going into the new domicile because it would be a desirable place.

Matt McCants:

So let's wrap up today's podcast with a parting thought for our listeners. What would be your big takeaway, and what would you really like to say to wrap up today?

Scott Plyler:

I think the biggest thing that we deal with on the Scheduling Analytics committee, it's just the change management. We have a massive change in the contract. We have so many pokers in the fire, various fires. We've got over 10 different product lines still coming out that we're still working on. We're still getting through the implementation of a few other ones, working out the kinks, getting some glitches fixed. We have a lot of education to do here.

And then on top of that, we have an airline that's morphing into a more robust and more international, more traditional airline, we're adding red eyes. We're even involved in talking about this, the 1M opener for foreign international. And everybody can see the writings on the wall that eventually this airline's going to be doing foreign international, and that's going to be a big change.

But just managing all of this change, whether it's with the contract that changes to our network schedule. It's a lot to take in. We hear what pilots say, we get phone calls, we get emails, we watch Facebook, we watch the forum. We know what your inputs are, and we will continue to work on making sure that we implement this contract as best we can by working with our company partners. But there is a lot going on and there does need to be, we have to have a lot of patience with the folks that we work with, and we hope that our pilots can see all of the things that have come out already that are coming in the near future, and all the improvements to our quality of life and our pay. It just takes a long time to change the course of a massive ship, and "Oh, by the way, we're changing the tires on this 18 wheeler at the same time we're going down the highway at 70 miles an hour." It's lot.

Meagan Nelan:

That's not to mention too, that there is also an initiative coming down the pipe to do an overhaul of CWA modernize, modularize, so it's not one monolithic product and they can iteratively improve it. So that's been on their docket for a while, but they had to take a break from that to implement this contract.

So I would hate for anybody to feel change fatigue. It might be a little bit of that with all of these things that are happening, but I think we're in a pretty good spot in terms of all the different areas that we get to collaborate, that we can manage it to our best ability and try to do that in a good manner with our company counterparts.

Tony Mulhare:

We'd like to thank Scott and Meagan for giving us the 41,000-foot view of the scheduling world, and all the projects they're continually working on. If you haven't used all the new capabilities that are out there, take a look at how they work in the scheduling handbook. Maybe there's a few that could improve your quality of life, increase your pay, or both.

If you have any notes for this podcast or any of our com products, please reach out to us at comm@swapa.org. Feedback is always welcome.

Matt McCants:

Finally, our bonus number today is 154. That's how many pilots have deadheads starting or ending pairings between December 2nd and December 3rd. When self-release goes live, it can utilize the new option.