A lot happens before I ever jump in an airplane and go flying. I linked to some videos in a previous blog entry that a guy here at World made. The first one talks about sales, aircraft scheduling and so on. My involvement comes much later. But between sales and aircraft scheduling and me comes crew planning.
By the 19th of each month, our planning department publishes the bidlines for the following month. They arrange all of the known flying for that month into month-long schedules that includes trips (usually containing a series of flights and layovers) and days off. At some other airlines, they publish individual trips of 1 to 5ish days in length instead of whole months, and the pilots bid based on preferences (for trips or days off) instead of whole months. Otherwise, the bidding process is somewhat similar. Regardless of the operation, the common practice is to publish flying, allow crews to bid on it, award it in seniority order, and then fly it. That’s usually done a month at a time, though some freight outfits do 13 4-week bid periods a year, and occasionally I hear of 2-month bidlines.
At a scheduled airline, there are occasionally schedule changes after the lines are published. During the course of operating, there are occasionally extenuating circumstances that cause delays or cancellations (maintenance, weather, and so on). But all those disruptions are somewhat unusual. For example, at the scheduled airline I used to work at, for the first 6 months of 2008, they cancelled just over 3% of their flights, and operated about 27% late. And among the late flights, the average arrival delay was less than one hour. Those statistics cover their total operation with no ‘excuses’.
At World, things are quite different. Being a non-scheduled airline, we don’t keep statistics the same way that scheduled airlines do. We keep statistics according to the specifications in our various contracts with our customers. Customer cancellations don’t count as our cancellations, and uncontrollable delays (which vary from customer to customer and include their delays) don’t count against us, either. Those statistics make us look pretty good (indeed, we are, I think). Year to date, our cancellations were under 1%, and our total controllable delays were less than 14%. So hey, we do better than my last job, right?
Well, not exactly. Those figures don’t include uncontrollable delays, some of which would be customer requests (for example, waiting for delayed freight), nor do they report the length of the delays. It’s actually quite common that we’ll delay trips by quite large increments due to things like waiting for parts, or customer preferences (the military tends to prefer a 24 hour delay to a 6 hour one). That figure also doesn’t include missions that are scrubbed by the customer before departure. Oh, and it also excludes our own ferry (positioning) flights, which we do quite a lot of and don’t seem to care of they run on time or not.
All of those things do affect the crewmembers schedules, though. Remember those bidlines? They contain what the company knows about by the 19th (sometimes a few days earlier). Between the time those are published and the time we go out flying (sometimes more than a month, for trips at the end of the month), a lot can happen to cause the schedules to change. And often, changes to one flight impacts other flights of ours even though those flights may actually operate on time (with different crews). The moral of the story is, crewmember schedule reliability is not 99%, not 86%, not 59%, but some really low number that is a lower percentage than all the hiccups in the whole company put together… or something like that. For that reason, and to cover ad-hoc flying (which we do a lot of), we have way more reserves and ‘open flyers’ who don’t have schedules in advance, but just go pick up the pieces and make it all happen.
But, in theory, the bidlines are plans and should go as planned. Since coming to the DC-10, I’ve noticed that a lot less goes as planned than I was accustomed to flying bidlines on the MD-11. I decided I’d add up what I’ve done so far and see how (un)reliable the bidlines really are. The statistic I was most interested in is what number (or percentage) ran on time as originally scheduled. I decided to use this criteria for determining on on time as originally scheduled: the flight operated with the city pairs that were in the bid packet, on the day that was in the bid packet, with the same type of aircraft and operation (i.e. live passenger, ferry, freighter, etc.) and arrived no more than 19 minutes later than the bid packet showed for arrival time (i.e. 20 minutes = late).
I’ve had 4 bidlines since coming over to the DC-10 (September I was open due to vacation). After resolving the conflicts between them, I was originally scheduled for a grand total of 32 flights on those 4 bidlines. Here’s how it all went:
In June, my entire line of 10 flights cancelled due to the customer not operating them. I wound up doing a bunch of other stuff instead.
In July, the first part of my trip cancelled because the last part of June (the rescheduled June) delayed so much I couldn’t make my early July trips. In the second part of July, one flight delayed a bunch before the trip (several hours), one operated with a different origin city at a different time, and one cancelled (for me) all together (I think it actually delayed several days, but I didn’t work it). The late July trip was a total disaster, operating days late with different cities.
In August, one flight changed significantly (different departure city and time), but then I flew one ferry flight as originally scheduled and early(!). Unfortunately the next leg (a live passenger flight) arrived 20 minutes late due to a departure delay caused by flight attendant ground transportation. At the end of the month, one flight departed 16 minutes late but arrived only 4 minutes late bringing me all the way up to 2 flights on time as originally scheduled. The next one departed on time but arrived 24 minutes late. So by the end of my third month of bidlines, I had operated only 2 flights with on time arrivals (less than 20 minutes late), and two of them ‘almost’ on time (20 and 24 minutes late).
That brings us to October (I was open in September). While I’ll expand on the drama in a separate post, the best I can possibly do this month is 2 out of 9 flights on time, and I haven’t flown those yet. The first day, one city pair changed, and one whole leg cancelled (for me.. a different crew flew it). Then the next pair operated 3 days late. The two after that had already cancelled, but even if they hadn’t I wouldn’t have operated them due to the previous delay. And the last flight of the month has already cancelled. That leaves just one pair of flights this weekend that could possibly run on time as originally scheduled. Of course, I’m not real optimistic, but we’ll give it a try.
So let’s review. In 4 months of bidlines, 2 out of 30 flights so far went as originally scheduled and arrived less than 20 minutes late. That’s 7% on time. 21 (70%) changed cities and/or were cancelled all together. 7 (23%) were delayed between 20 minutes and 3 days.
The moral of the story is this: If I tell you on the 24th (when the bidlines are awarded) that I’m flying from ABC to XYC on some day at some time, there’s about a 7% chance that it’ll really happen that way.
V-