• SECONDARY LINE CONSTRUCTION
• PARTIAL LINE CONSTRUCTION
• NEW IDENTIFICATION CARDS
• Accessing The Hub
• AFA Local Numbers

Dear Members,

SECONDARY LINE CONSTRUCTION

AFA made several proposals to the Company in November to help mitigate the effects of the FAA 24/7 interpretation with regard to Reserve on call/on duty. One of the proposals was to increase the number of Secondary lines that are built each month in order to reduce the number of Reserves. AFA convinced the Company to increase the number of Secondary Lines by altering the Secondary Line range required by the Contract.

This Eline is intended to address specific complaints to me from some members that AFA "lied to them again" and did not really do anything to increase the number of Secondary Lines. That is a false charge and one based on a flawed comparison. Yes, there are fewer Secondary Lines in January vs. December but that has no relationship to the AFA proposal to increase the Secondary Line process going forward and that will be justified in this Eline.

Contractually the following provision applies to the building of both Primary and Secondary Lines of Flying:

1 -9. B. Lines of Flying Construction

1. General

a. Primary and secondary lines of flying shall be constructed to contain between seventy (70:00) and ninety-five (95:00) credited hours. Lines shall be built based on the monthly maximum as determined by the Director of Crew Scheduling for each domicile and the range shall be the monthly maximum minus fifteen (15:00) hours (i.e., for a maximum of eighty-five (85:00) hours, the range shall be seventy (70:00) to eighty-five (85:00) hours; for a maximum of ninety (90:00) hours, the range shall be seventy-five (75:00) to ninety (90:00) hours; and for a maximum of ninety-five (95:00) hours, the range shall be eighty (80:00) to ninety-five (95:00) hours).

This provision requires the range for Secondary Line construction be set at 15 hours. For example, in a 90 hour month to satisfy the contractual range the Secondary Line floor has to be 75 hours. In order for more lines to be built AFA convinced the Company to alter the range.

A test was run on the December Lines (which had already been built) to determine what range would yield the greatest increase. The results of that test are in the following chart.

The December lines were constructed per the Contract with a range of 75-90 and that range yielded 501 Secondary Lines systemwide. Some have suggested that AFA should have used a narrower range to yield more lines, but as you can see a 70-80, 10 hour range, would have only yielded 437 Secondary Lines systemwide. A 70-85 range would have yielded 608 and a 70-90 range would have yielded 604 Secondary Lines.

Before I go any farther with this discussion, it is necessary for all of us to understand where the trips come from to build Secondary Lines. The trips that are used to build the Secondary Lines come from Open Time. The trips placed into Open time are trips that are dropped in SAP, Vacation and other means, such as leaves.

Trips dropped because of Vacation and SAP are, by far, the largest contributor to the amount of Open Time. In months where Vacation is held by more senior Flight Attendants there will be more trips dropped into Open Time. In months where there is less senior vacation there will be less trips dropped into Open Time.

In months where there are a lot of trips dropped due to SAP there will be more trips available in Open Time.

The most senior Vacation is held by Flight Attendants in Holiday months such as November and December thus more trips are dropped into Open Time. Senior Vacation also increases during the summer months of June, July and August.

Two other factors that influence the ability to build Secondary Lines are where the Open Time trips are distributed throughout the month and what value the Company assigns for a Reserve percentage. In the first instance trips that are in Open time sometimes tend to piled up on certain days and when that happens it becomes impossible distribute that time into Secondary Lines. In the second instance, the Company has agreed to lower Reserve percentage by 1% each month until the Reserve population can more adequately reflect the need and ability to cover trips.

The chart above indicates that if we had put this practice in place for December the net increase using a 70-85 range would have been an additional 107 Secondary Lines for December and if a 70-90 range would have been used the net increase would have been 103 lines. Even thought the larger range yielded 4 less lines, AFA made the decision to use a 70-90 range for January for two reasons; 1) as evidenced by the 70-80 range on the above chart, the smaller the range, the less lines and, 2) December is typically a very hard month to predict SAP behavior. AFA believed in the long run a larger range would yield the greater number of Secondary Lines for January. We could have waited until January to run another test but that would have further delayed the implementation of a process to increase the number of Secondary Lines. We will have a test run on the January '07 Secondary lines using the 70-85 hour range to determine if that would have yielded a greater number of Secondary Lines.

Now to the big question on a lot of people's minds (and emails):

Why, if AFA forced the Company to alter the range in order to build more Secondary Lines, are there fewer lines in January than there were in December?

The answer is because in January there are fewer trips dropped into Open Time because there is less senior vacation and SAP drops. As explained above Secondary Lines are only created using trips from Open Time - fewer trips equal fewer lines. In order to truly judge the effectiveness of altering the range for Secondary Lines a more accurate comparison would be to use the data from January '06 and compare it to January '07. Another example that bears this out is difference in the number of Secondary Lines in November 2006 systemwide (664) and December 2006 system wide (769). In November there was a combination of fewer trips in Open Time and an uneven distribution of those trips.

The following Chart will show what did occur in January 2007 by altering the Secondary Line Range:

As the chart indicates, by increasing the range to 70-90 hours, there was a net increase of 197 Secondary Lines systemwide in January 2007 as compared to January 2006. Had AFA not convinced the Company to increase the range there would have been no meaningful increase, if any. I hope this helps everyone to understand that AFA believes we did the right thing by convincing the Company to alter the Secondary Line range. If any of you would like to discuss this further please feel free to call or email me.

PARTIAL LINE CONSTRUCTION

I received emails this week from three members all alleging the same thing. All three reported they had been told by various Inflight Staff members that AFA had refused the Company's request to build partial lines of flying.

I have no reason to doubt the validity of the reports but since I did not hear the actual words from Inflight I have to be careful in my response.

Here are the facts- AFA MADE THE PROPOSAL TO THE COMPANY TO CREATE PARTIAL LINES OF FLYING AND THE COMPANY REFUSED TO ENTERTAIN OUR PROPOSAL.

The intent of our proposal was to eliminate as much of the uncovered Open Time that cannot be built into Secondary Lines as possible by putting it into Reserve lines. AFA presented several different scenarios to accomplish this such as an augmentation period similar to Secondary Line Augmentation and an automated process. The Company response to the former was that it would cause a manpower problem and the latter would cost $100,000 to implement. In our view neither excuse was adequate. We believe the Company is unwilling to spend money or effort in changing until they know what the merged contract will look like.

AFA is completely aware of what we proposed and have our meeting notes and minutes to refute any claims by management that we refused to create partial lines.

In light of the FAA interpretation, the ETB system is not working for Reserves or Lineholders. We are also aware the Reserve LTO system does not work. Although we will continue to try to make improvements in the short term, you have our commitment that we will not let the opportunity of a merged contract negotiation go by without significant improvements that meet the needs of all of our members.

NEW IDENTIFICATION CARDS

For some unknown reason the Company has placed the official Company Hire Date on the back of the new IDs. According to the Company this was done for "your reference only". This has apparently led to some confusion with regard to bidding and position preference when originating a trip. Our seniority list is based on the date that appears on our SID cards. Use the date on the SID card for all bidding and position selection purposes.

Continue to use your pre-merger employee number for all purposes including travel.


Thank you,

Mike Flores, President
US Airways MEC
AFA-CWA

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AFA US Airways website

http://www.afausairways.org/

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AFA Local Numbers

Council 40 PIT 724-695-3329
Council 41 DCA 703-212-8090
Council 69 BOS 781-289-8454
Council 70 PHL 215-492-0840
Council 82 LGA 315-736-3483
Council 89 CLT 704-527-0325

New Hotline Number Toll Free: 866-USA-AFA2
US AIRWAYS Benefits Information 800-872-4780

Reply to Inflight: askinflight@usairways.com

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