Jet Blue blames WX, pilot rest rules for system meltdown

Seggy said:
So it is the weather then and not the pilot rest rules? Also, I disagree about the concentration. This was a huge storm and hubs from MSP, ORD, DTW, NYC, BOS, PHL, DCA/IAD were affected.
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The storm was no doubt the main event, I was off that day but I'm sure most hubs closed (JFK/BOS etc).

What I saw follow was weather and circumstances that made recovery difficult at JFK and Bos. Specifically the closing of JFK Sunday morning (well after the snow event) because of the iced over taxiways and CRJ excursion. Dozens of diversions and gate returns during the 2-3 hr stretch of closure. Huge wrench in the recovery...I was among them.

Following day BOS and JFK fogged in till noon. 600-700RVR with 13kt tailwind on active landing RWY. Again dozens of diversions and cancellations. I was among them too.

Snowstorm day 1.....JFK multiple hr closure day 2....BOS fogged in day 3....Yes it was quite concentrated for JB who does have 50-60% of flights going through those airports (not sure if you were questioning that data).

Those things alone were challenging, the rest rules I think were the icing on the cake. Saying it was rest rules alone would be inaccurate as well as saying it was just the WX.

If you're stuck cancelling, then having two days full of diversions and gate returns you're going to struggle now matter how many hands are on deck.
 
Baronman said:
Those things alone were challenging, the rest rules I think were the icing on the cake. Saying it was rest rules alone would be inaccurate as well as saying it was just the WX.

If you're stuck cancelling, then having two days full of diversions and gate returns you're going to struggle now matter how many hands are on deck.
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I think that blaming the rest rules at all is just ridiculous. While we all know bad weather will happen 'sometime', there are plans in place, and if it gets bad enough, there's just nothing you can do about it. But the rest rules were a defined thing with a lot of lead time to prepare. Even Eagle did a month's dry run under the new rules before they were required to try and foresee problems. Blaming a fixed operating requirement because you were unwilling to adapt is just lazy.
 
Seggy said:
Jetblue is the ONLY one that shut down their entire operation to these airports to 'reset' it. Now there are rumors on the other boards that they had to 'reset' the operation themselves or the FAA was going to do it for them due to their lack of crew legality record keeping under FAR 117.
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Yeah, because rumors on other boards are valid. Most of those guys that post over on those boards don't even know their own healthcare benefits well enough to debate them, yet they'll tell you how much $$$ they spent out of pocket, which if they're on the same healthcare plan any of the rest of us are, they need to be making a LOT of phone calls....
 
Firebird2XC said:
By 'years' I mean they've known it was coming since 2010, right? The exact rules weren't in the hopper that far back, but they had an idea it was coming. How do the people that have plans for plans for plans not have a plan?
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Assume your mortgage company said they were changing the rules in a couple of year, then they finally tell you what it's gonna be a year later, but there's a lot of grey area. Anytime you call to get it clarified, you get "Please hold." and no answer. That's essentially what happened with the FAA. Me? I'm not surprised the FAA ran it this way, so it's kinda hard to plan your staffing model and still run a viable business while not having your questions answered.

I'm sure some of the Legacies- like Doug mentioned, have more restrictive contract rules anyways, but in the LCC world and the Regional sector things are probably seeing a lot of change.
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If the storm hadn't hit and affected our two biggest focus cities, we wouldn't have had any issues. lumping the LCCs in with the regionals when talking about rest rules is a little silly. People around here complain when the get a 10:30 overnight because it's too short. Our schedules didn't change much at all when the turned on the FAR 117. The problem happens when you don't have planes and reserves sitting in BUF or PWM to restart the operation. Or you've got planes, no pilots and all the flights outbound canceled so you can't get crews there to fly them.
 
Firebird2XC said:
You hire more reserves, if that's what it takes. Maybe tweak sequences/pairings so they're not constantly flirting with max duty times.
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You can't retroactively hire people, just like you can't see a major snowstorm along with the other issues coming 3-4 months out. By all the staffing models and simulations we've been running since Oct, we're where we should be. Magins are thin enough at the airline industry, you can't just carry an extra 50 reserves "just in case." And I haven't been CLOSE to a max duty time my entire time here.
 
Once again, why are other airlines not blaming it (as much at least) on FAR 117 but JetBlue is?

If management really knew what they were doing, they wouldn't wait for a return phone call from the FAA. Also is that what your company is using as an example? Because I don't believe that is the case. The FAA was pretty proactive with these new regs from my understanding.

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kellwolf said:
You can't retroactively hire people, just like you can't see a major snowstorm along with the other issues coming 3-4 months out. By all the staffing models and simulations we've been running since Oct, we're where we should be. Magins are thin enough at the airline industry, you can't just carry an extra 50 reserves "just in case." And I haven't been CLOSE to a max duty time my entire time here.
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I suppose it's a different story elsewhere in the industry. At the Beagle I've been right up on max duty times pre and post FAR 117.
If your scenario with duty times is true, it's even more likely that Jet Blue is using any excuse it can find to blame its operational woes.
Bad weather is bad weather, sure- Eagle cancelled a few days of operations in Dallas due to a forecast- which never materialized.

My point in all of this is that a few extra reserves aren't going to break an airline, and blaming a complete breakdown of the system on what amounts to relatively marginal restrictions on the staffing duty hour model shouldn't be a token point of blame.
 
kellwolf said:
You can't retroactively hire people, just like you can't see a major snowstorm along with the other issues coming 3-4 months out. By all the staffing models and simulations we've been running since Oct, we're where we should be. Magins are thin enough at the airline industry, you can't just carry an extra 50 reserves "just in case." And I haven't been CLOSE to a max duty time my entire time here.
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Margins are very thin in the airline industry and I agree with you that you can't just hire lots of "just in case" employees. I have a feeling though that this one costs Jet Blue some coin which has the consequence of making margins even thinner unless they've insured against losses of this nature.

Guess it's just a matter of picking your poison.
 
The one example of old ways of doing business explains in a nutshell the reason 117 made it worse. Typically scheduling will reassign, and get the hotels second. That hour or two delay getting a room was absorbed by the crew. I'm not defending it, but that's how IROPs were run.

Well, then they tried to do that during this storm. Why? Because they've done it that way for years. Throw in 117, and the rest doesn't begin until the crew gets a room. All of a sudden your rested crew isn't rested after all, and delays/cancellations ensue. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually you've gotta reboot.

I think JetBlue learned a lot from 2/14/2007, but some of the underlying problems were still there. But they fixed it enough to handle things for the most part. 117 upset the apple cart in a complicated way that's difficult to predict. So here we are. It's not JUST 117. It's not JUST the weather. And it's not JUST the mismanagement of resources. All three came together in a grand fashion.

It's just like any aircraft accident, no single cause can always be found.
 
kellwolf said:
You can't retroactively hire people, just like you can't see a major snowstorm along with the other issues coming 3-4 months out. By all the staffing models and simulations we've been running since Oct, we're where we should be. Magins are thin enough at the airline industry, you can't just carry an extra 50 reserves "just in case." And I haven't been CLOSE to a max duty time my entire time here.
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Actually, yeah, you can. When I was hired at US Airways last year, the VP of Ops specifically told me he was hiring me for Age 65 attrition and the new rest rules. This was in December of 2012.


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117 is a mixed bag. If they build in big enough buffers to avoid getting crews stuck at an outstation the trips become much less efficient which means we all have to work more days to make the same money. While I agree that you can't hire reserves for the 1% of the time you might need them, i would be willing to bet some bean counter is calculating the cost of shutting down an airline for 17 hours against staffing an extra 10% reserves? (and maybe sending them to impacted cities or out stations to be airport reserve ahead of winter storms?)

The bean counters - which isn't us - need to decide what the headline risk is in dollars of an event like the one that just transpired and then determine if it warrants buying insurance.

I hope to never need the insurance on my house, but I pay the premiums every month...
 
PhilosopherPilot said:
The one example of old ways of doing business explains in a nutshell the reason 117 made it worse. Typically scheduling will reassign, and get the hotels second. That hour or two delay getting a room was absorbed by the crew. I'm not defending it, but that's how IROPs were run.

Well, then they tried to do that during this storm. Why? Because they've done it that way for years. Throw in 117, and the rest doesn't begin until the crew gets a room. All of a sudden your rested crew isn't rested after all, and delays/cancellations ensue. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually you've gotta reboot.

I think JetBlue learned a lot from 2/14/2007, but some of the underlying problems were still there. But they fixed it enough to handle things for the most part. 117 upset the apple cart in a complicated way that's difficult to predict. So here we are. It's not JUST 117. It's not JUST the weather. And it's not JUST the mismanagement of resources. All three came together in a grand fashion.

It's just like any aircraft accident, no single cause can always be found.
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The rest behind the door was known two years ago when the rules first came out. Pretty black and white, however, according to @kellwolf, JetBlue was waiting for the FAA to call JetBlue back to get an interpretation? So what is really going on there?

Also, as I have said a few times, horrible management to worry about a 'reliability and dependability policy' that may find a couple of pilots who are taking advantage of sick leave, yet your Flight Operations Management missed the big picture on how to recover from an IROP with the new FAR 117. You don't create policy to govern a handful of people. If you do you will miss the big picture like this and it will bite you in the ass, like it did.
 
Seggy said:
The rest behind the door was known two years ago when the rules first came out. Pretty black and white, however, according to @kellwolf, JetBlue was waiting for the FAA to call JetBlue back to get an interpretation? So what is really going on there?

Also, as I have said a few times, horrible management to worry about a 'reliability and dependability policy' that may find a couple of pilots who are taking advantage of sick leave, yet your Flight Operations Management missed the big picture on how to recover from an IROP with the new FAR 117. You don't create policy to govern a handful of people. If you do you will miss the big picture like this and it will bite you in the ass, like it did.
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Apples/oranges.

JetBlue isn't alone here with the 117 rules. I've been saying for a year that the complex interaction between all the different ways to time out was going to cause a meltdown with the first serious IROP. Here we are. Industry wide meltdown.

Until you gain experience with the rules LIVE you just can't prepare fully. There are things that happen that you won't foresee.

As far as the sick policy goes. You just don't get it. There was NO policy for sick time. None. So you couldn't fire someone for abusing sick calls. They had to put something in place.

Read this three times so you get it: A sick policy is not inherently bad. A bad sick policy is, but it is necessary to have some type of policy to outline the expectations and limits. I don't understand why you can't comprehend that. You're just saying over and over again "any sick policy is bad" which is plain wrong.
 
DE727UPS said:
Here is something to understand. You aren't ALPA. Because you aren't ALPA you will be attacked by Seggy. That's it. That explains Seggy and his online persona. Dot period. Have a nice day.
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It's people like him that really make me want to vote "HECK NO" to ALPA. Unfortunately we need a CBA, so we need them. We can't afford to get a union up and running without their money.
 
PhilosopherPilot said:
Apples/oranges.
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Not at all. You can policy people to death but miss the entire picture.

JetBlue isn't alone here with the 117 rules. I've been saying for a year that the complex interaction between all the different ways to time out was going to cause a meltdown with the first serious IROP. Here we are. Industry wide meltdown.
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I wouldn't call it an industry wide meltdown. A 5-15% cancelations rate a few days after a snowstorm isn't abnormal. If you are at 46%, that is a different story.

Until you gain experience with the rules LIVE you just can't prepare fully. There are things that happen that you won't foresee.
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If that is the case than why is JetBlue asking for relief from FAR 117. Shouldn't they be doing a 'lessons learned' module instead?

As far as the sick policy goes. You just don't get it. There was NO policy for sick time. None. So you couldn't fire someone for abusing sick calls. They had to put something in place. Read this three times so you get it: A sick policy is not inherently bad. A bad sick policy is, but it is necessary to have some type of policy to outline the expectations and limits. I don't understand why you can't comprehend that. You're just saying over and over again "any sick policy is bad" which is plain wrong.
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No I get it VERY clearly. You don't need to put a policy in place for a couple of folks who may abuse sick leave.

You have a legal obligation to abide by the rules set forth by the FAA with your medical. A company policy where you can get in trouble for calling in sick to much isn't abiding by those terms of one's FAA Aeromedical Certification.
 
DE727UPS said:
Here is something to understand. You aren't ALPA. Because you aren't ALPA you will be attacked by Seggy. That's it. That explains Seggy and his online persona. Dot period. Have a nice day.
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Actually, it has nothing to do with ALPA. ALPA is FAR from the end all, be all.

JetBlue is a good company, they have treated their employees relatively well, and will be successful. I am not going to sit here though and not call it like I see it. I guarantee that when heads roll at JetBlue it will be blamed how they handled the implementation of FAR 117. Yet, I get attacked by doing the same? Really?
 
PhilosopherPilot said:
It's people like him that really make me want to vote "HECK NO" to ALPA. Unfortunately we need a CBA, so we need them. We can't afford to get a union up and running without their money.
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I am just a line pilot. Not sure why that would want you to vote no to ALPA.
 
You must have a policy in place to outline the limits and expectations, or people will abuse sick calls. We had a pretty big problem, and that drove the policy to be put into place. No one is getting punished for calling in sick. You can all in sick 100 times if you are sick 100 times. You will get into trouble if you call in sick and aren't sick, and as a safety guy, I'm fine with that.

Pilots are into this mindset lately that they never have to answer for anything. And the mere act of asking them to deign to answer a question is discipline. That attitude needs to die.
 
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