EK Roster satisfaction

[keepitrealok]

Left Seat. 14 days AL and 63hrs flying. Anybody who thinks that is reasonable needs their head read.

[BANANASBANANAS]

I can certainly see your point and have much sympathy for it.

However, consider the junior guys who are currently (in theory) sharing your roster pain. If senior guys are going to get more of what they bid for then logic dictates that the junior guys will get even less of what they bid for. All fine in theory but a worsening of the qol for the junior guys (all the junior capts will be bond free) may well be enough for them to quit and that will just make life even worse for everyone that is left.

I agree with your sentiments but they need to be applied imho only when we have sufficient pilot numbers. At the moment, despite lack of easy access to a seniority list, I think it is evident that we are very short of numbers.

This airline has reached, and gone thru 'critical mass' in its manpower problems imho and it is going to take something much more radical than incorporating seniority into roster bidding to fix.

[BigGeordie]

Difficult (if not impossible) to replace experience is walking out of the door every day. They need to think of something to keep it here and clearly the 3% 'discretionary' increment isn't going to do it.

If you know your roster will never ever get any better why stay?

[felixthecat]

Solve the recruitment by solving the retention.... treat us like humans not machines. If you don't the slippery slope is going to turn into a cliff....Though why I even write on here I have no idea. The powers that be obviously read and look at PPrune but pay exactly zero heed to what is staring them in the face. Once apathy sets in and people feel they have no part in the company and are not valued they look elsewhere. Like a stale marriage, the rot sets in and the unhappy partner looks elsewhere. The other airlines can smell the easy pickings and are swarming to Dubai to pick up experienced pilots that have been trained at EK expense. The mentality here is astounding at the moment.

EK will slowly turn into Gulf Air and Etihad/Qatar will take the mantle, till greed and poor management gets the better of them too.

[BANANASBANANAS]

The indigenous mentality tends to be not to bother maintaining and looking after anything. Rather, it seems to be a case of waiting until something is broken and then fix or replace it.

Time to fix attrition!

[Laker]

Originally Posted by Seaman Staynes

I have been seriously hacked of with this farce of a new roster system having recently got nothing I bid for. After discussing this at length, having heard that the roster planning manager apparently said repeatedly that seniority cannot be applied to the roster system "even if tasked" at the last forum, I was shown some of the stuff jeppesen puts online about the system and was interested to see this question in the blurb:

For senior crew the strict order must remain. Is it possible to award bids differently for junior crew?
You can use different assignment principles for various crew groups. For crew members with many service years the assignment of bids can remain very strict. For crew members with very few years of service it is possible to let seniority have an impact, but not be totally dominant.

Also there was this:
Equal distribution can be combined with preferential bidding in seniority order.

Have a look here http://ww1.jeppesen.com/documents/av...wRostering.pdf

So correct me if I am wrong but the roster / planning bloke is a deceiving, misleading,psuedologist as seniority can be used in the preferential bidding system and seniority can also be applied throughout the system to keep the experienced guys a little happier? Yes I'm sure he's a decent bloke ( ) and he's doing what he's told......however.......

Now if others have a look and concur with this, lets make sure they know it at the forum, write in etc. Seniority needs to be applied and not only for Captains, there are some pretty senior FOs delayed by age / aircraft type who are getting awful rosters as well!

Hope that all makes sense!

Of course Preferential Bidding can be programmed to honor seniority. That's exactly how it works at all the union airlines which use PBS bidding. The problem is that arrangement requires more pilots (less profit). As long as the planes get from point A to point B I don't think the top management at EK cares about 'roster satisfaction'.

[LHR Rain]

Do they care about pilots leaving?
As I said earlier even the Canadians are leaving Emirates. That should serve as a wake up call to the management.
When you pissed off the Canadians you've really gone low.

[Jetkopite]

I agree with above seniority should be respected to prevent them loosing all the experience left and right which is a dangerous game. In my opinion if you are in top 2 bid groups and senior there should be no excuses for not being able to write your own roster.

This issue has to be brought up at the next few roster meetings and forums..

[felixthecat]

Its very difficult to argue seniority with no seniority list !

[Trader]

The rotating bid system work very well under previous systems (until they began to interfere with it).

There is no need to go to a strict seniority system. However, the rotating system is now broken so everyone is miserable. If they would fix it so that it worked properly you would get essentially what you want in top groups and far less in bottom groups. If you are senior then you might get almost exactly what you want in top bids and some fairly good bottoms bids (due to relative seniority in your group).

[FcU]

5 bid groups. Bottom 4 rotate. Top 20% have earned the right to get what they bid for. Block of days before and after leave. No more 5 day blocks of "burn" leave. Discuss

[felixthecat]

Rosters are rubbish as we all know. My beef isn't where I go so much as what time I have off to enjoy with family. Until lifestyle makes an appearance then nothing changes, be it Milan, Rome or Dakar and Lagos, I want time to enjoy life!