Re: thomsonfly queries
The roster is very stable. Once published they CANNOT CHANGE it outside of a Block Window (+/-2 hrs of report and off duty times) without your consent and you are under no obligation to give that consent, no matter how many days in advance. You bid for Flexi Working on an electronic form (just a calender where you tick the days you want to offer) and the company choose what they want you to work (there may be none). If you have bid and they give you more than 48hrs notice of a duty, you are expected to do it. If less than 48hrs notice you can refuse it as you may have made other plans by that late stage. They also hold a 'Cold Call' list for Flexi Working, with pilots who are happy to be contacted whilst off duty to be offered a flying duty. Again, no obligation to accept any offer through a cold call. The system is pretty basic and could be adjusted to make all duties 'desirable', as at present there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of work you may be required to do on a 'Flexi'; for instance, you might get called out for an Amsterdam, when you will be back at home in about 5hrs, and if it goes past midnight you get a double payment, conversly, on the 75/767 fleets you may be asked to do a Sharm el Sheik for only one payment! One of our pilots actually wrote a computer program to factor all flights based on duration, time of day/ night so that the most unpopular ones got the greatest payments. Made sense when he showed me it, but management haven't taken him up on it.......
Flexible Working is a mechanism which allows the company the flexibility to 'fire fight' if they need to, using volunteers who will get reasonably well rewarded for offering their services (and being used). This in itself leads to greater roster stability as there is no requirement to change someone's roster; just call a volunteer out. Anyone who has worked under the 'old' style system of Crewing Departments just constantly fire-fighting on a daily basis, knows that every time they change one duty it leads to a whole host of other pilots' rosters being changed and hence no stability (read lifestyle) for those involved.
We also do block weeks of standby duties (very few though), which you can bid for inadvance (which allows you to 'see' the 3 BDOs before and after the week a long time in advance of the roster issue) and this also crams all the disruption into one period, where you can expect to do lots of travelling and fire-fighting, the agreement being that Flexi-Working is employed first, standbys as a last resort.
Even during these turbulent times of expansion and lack of crews the rosters remain stable. Another initiative to increase productivity is for the Carmen Rostering Optimiser to be introduced, which should see us fly more due to more efficient rostering without impacting on our days off. Most were in favour as it appeared to be another 'win, win', BUT there are issues such as the Block Window protection only applying when you are flying out of your base, whereas Carmen may optimise you and have you flying from many different bases during a 'Pairing' (home base to home base duty with a number of days in between), hence you could end up doing anything on the days in between..........we are yet to see this fully.
PP