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Fellow Porter Pilots,
There was a significant error in the September schedule award, as detailed in the Company’s email on August 26, 2025.
Here’s what we understand went wrong:
A required manual workaround from NavBlue PBS resulted in the doubling of the flight duty times for September pairings.
Example: A YOW turn worth 4 hours of credit was calculated at 8 hours of flight duty, resulting in perceived CAR duty violations (112/28 error on NavBlue reason reports).
- The over-inflated value of the pairings resulted in multiple violations preventing pilots from holding their seniority-based pairing award.
- This led to many regular block holders not reaching ARC windows, leading to excessive open time.
- Significant unstacking was required to cover this open time.
Thank you to everyone who reached out to us at poemec@alpa.org following the initial schedule release. Your feedback brought the issue to our attention, prompting us to immediately reach out to the Company for clarification. Once the issue with the bid was identified (and we appreciate management’s openness in disclosing the error), there were two paths forward:
- Keep the original schedules that were released on August 23; or,
- Re-run the bid properly and publish the revised schedules by August 29.
The reasoning behind the MEC not opposing the re-run of the September schedule was as follows:
- We are a seniority-based pilot group. This is the fundamental principle which underlies our entire scheduling process.
- Management initially released a schedule that, because of the error that was subsequently uncovered, did not respect system seniority.
With those points considered, the only equitable option was to rerun the bid in accordance with seniority.
We recognize that rerunning the bid will impact some pilots’ lives. We also understand that not receiving a new schedule until August 29th is difficult for everyone. Today, we met with management to discuss how to resolve this issue. Both parties agreed that it is difficult to develop an appropriate solution without knowing how many pilots are negatively impacted. Management has committed to meeting with us following the release of the schedule re-run to discuss how to best mitigate the impact on affected pilots.
We are also establishing a Scheduling Committee this week, with the goal of working alongside management to improve the scheduling process for all Porter pilots. If you would like to volunteer to join this committee, please email Michael Falk.
We will keep you informed of any developments. In the meantime, please email us if you have any questions or concerns.
In unity,
Andrew Axson
POE Interim MEC Chair
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