DC-9's sticking around a while longer at Delta like late 2013
Hi everybody, this is Steve Dickson with the weekly Flight Operations Update for Friday, March 9th. I am sure that by now most of you have had time to review the AE that was posted on Monday. When Network announced last week that it intended to keep 17 of the 24 DC-9’s flying through 2013, we immediately had to revisit our original plan, which called for staffing the additional MD-90’s with the DC-9 categories that had been slated to close on this bid. Network’s plan to expedite retiring at least thirty 50-seat RJs contributed to an ASM gap, opening the door to use the DC-9 to backfill the RJ flying until the 737-900s begin to arrive late summer next year. The current Network plan calls for the majority of DC-9 flying to be in Atlanta and Detroit compared to almost no departures from MSP. Right now our MSP credit time on the DC-9 is running over 40% and costs over $300,000 per month. This drove the difficult decision to close the MSP DC-9 categories and open categories in Atlanta where a significant portion of the flying will originate. We have been asked why we don’t run all of the DC-9 flying from Detroit. Basing all of the DC-9 flying in DTW would give us a credit improvement of only 10%. The credit that would be required to deadhead pilots to Atlanta would still be well over 30%, and that is simply not sustainable into 2013. If we open an ATL category and maintain DTW, we reduce our credit to around 15% which will offset the training costs that come with the bid. On top of that, with the lower credit, we will not need as many pilots to staff the fleet, so we will see fewer displacements from other categories at this time. So overall the approach we chose on this bid is the best overall for the pilot group, under the circumstances.
Closing categories in a base and opening them in another for a short duration is something that, under normal circumstances, we would definitely avoid. We always want to build up flying in a base to a very steady state before we make the decision to open a category, but in this case we are in a unique position. This decision is the most fiscally conservative approach; it’s sustainable for the duration of the DC-9’s life and minimizes disruptions to your categories to the greatest extent possible. These three factors added up to this decision being the best for the operation and also minimize the impact on our pilots’ quality of life.
Our plan is to close the MSP DC-9 categories as quickly as possible since almost all rotations begin and end with a deadhead. The exact closure date will depend on the amount of training this bid generates. When we initially open the ATL categories, you can anticipate the first several month trip builds to be a high percentage of one and two day trips, which are always a function of limited staffing and available hours, but once we get the categories staffed and the hours pick up, the rotations will look very similar to today’s DTW DC9 bid package.
From a training perspective, we are going to relocate one DC-9 sim from the Minneapolis training center to Atlanta in the September timeframe, and it should be up and running in Atlanta by the end of the year.
Keeping the DC-9 means we lost the available pilots we were going to use to fly the new MD-90’s that will be arriving at a rate of approximately 2 per month. The next best option is to draw staffing from the Atlanta 767 categories since we have a system surplus of 757/767 staffing and our long term plan was to eventually transition to all 7ER categories anyway. We will be displacing 36 ATL 767 Captains and 40 ATL 767 First Officers. Network has informed us that the majority of the MD90 flying will be out of ATL and MSP in order to maintain operational reliability. In an effort to balance Captain and First Officer staffing in ATL and MSP, we will have 18 ATL M88 Captain vacancies, 10 ATL M88 First Officer vacancies, 19 MSP M88 Captain vacancies and 17 MSP M88 First Officer vacancies. At this point, the MD-90 is our most pressing staffing requirement. We will start looking at how we staff the additional M90 and 737-900 deliveries in 2013 this fall when Network has a better idea on how it intends to use the new aircraft.
Well, that’s it for this week, thanks for all you do every day for our passengers and each other. Please fly safe and I’ll talk to you again next week.
