11.06.20 – APFA MIA Base Brief – December 2020 Allocations

Friday, November 6, 2020

December Staffing and Allocations

Once again, the Company has relaxed the penalties on the optimizer creating longer duty days, increased sit times, and multiple legs contained within the duty day. The entire APFA BOD and National Officers voiced their adamant concerns at the Company‘s effort to squeeze every ounce of productivity from our crews when creating the allocations for December. While some minor adjustments have been made, it is abundantly clear their objective to save money far outweighs the health and safety of our frontline employees.

LHR will not operate in December and is planned to return on January 5, 2021. I was told by Crew Allocations that Network Planning made this decision based on the unavailability of wide-body aircraft. If I get more information, I will certainly share it.

The Deep South plan for January and going forward is to alternate Rocket flying between GIG and GRU. So, depending on the schedule and departure times, GIG will have a long layover in January, and GRU will operate as a Rocket. The plan for February is GRU will have the long layover, and GIG will operate as a Rocket. This is very preliminary and is subject to change. I will update the base when this is confirmed.

All bases will have multiple mixing of narrow-body and wide-body flying. The Company will put out a communication explaining how this will appear when bidding in PBS. Please pay close attention to this communication before entering your bids. I have strongly objected to this cost-saving measure and have asked the Company to rerun the allocations keeping the sequences pure. They are not willing to rerun the allocations to remove the mixed pairing despite APFA citing a contractual violation. We will pursue this through litigation.

December’s total block hours will be 105,234. This is up roughly 3000 hours from November. In comparison, December of last year had 212,138 block hours. We still have a long way to go.

Here are the preliminary staffing numbers for December 2020 compared to those for December 2019:

Block Hours

• FLL… 4,807
• PBI… 2,528
• ATL… 1,726
• MCO… 1,786
• MIA… 95,317

Total: 105,234

In Solidarity,

Randy Trautman
APFA MIA Base President
[email protected]

Heidi Morgan
APFA MIA Full-Time Base Council Representative
[email protected]