The recent events in Los Cabos, Mexico have impacted us all.  It placed many of our Flight Attendants in the hurricane’s path and has required long duty days to remove crews, customers and aircraft from harms way.  We know that many of our members have friends and family that have been seriously impacted as well.

As of September 22, 2014 Alaska Airlines has temporarily suspended all flights to Los Cabos, (SJD) Airport.  They plan on resuming daily flights from LAX to SJD as soon as the airport opens for commercial use.

This will impact Flight Attendants in following ways:

• All but a few flights into SJD have been cancelled through the end of October 2014.
• Crew Scheduling received the cancelation notices yesterday and has begun to work through all the pre-cancelation sequences.
• The only flights to SJD that have not been canceled are one daily turn from LAX (LAX-SJD-LAX).  They will be cancelled on a day-to-day basis.  Management is hopeful that when the SJD airport opens these will be the first flights to operate.
• All pairings for November 2014, which previously contained SJD layovers, have been rebuilt in order to avoid any Flight Crews laying over in unacceptable conditions.  This may occur in December as well depending on the rebuilding progress.

Pre-Cancelation and How It Affects You

Those Flight Attendants that have sequences containing a canceled flight segment will receive notice from Crew Scheduling that there is a pre-cancelation within their pairing.  Please be advised that Section 10.T of the Collective Bargaining Agreement dictates your options.

Section 10.T.2 states:

When Crew Scheduling makes contact with the Flight Attendant regarding the cancellation(s).  The Company may offer the Flight Attendant an alternate assignment to open positions that may include multiple sequences on the same day or days as the flights cancelled…  The Flight Attendant may select the from the following options:

a.  Accept the alternate assignment.  (In which case you are pay protected for the greater of scheduled or flown)

b.  Decline the alternate assignment and waive pay protection.

c.  In the event that the alternate assignment contains a check in that is more than two hours earlier and/or release time that is more than two hours later than those contained in the Flight Attendants line of time, the Flight Attendant may decline and agree to contact Crew Scheduling between 6 pm and 8pm on the night before the first day of the flights canceled… to receive an alternate assignment.  Such assignment must operate within the check-in and release times at domicile of the flights cancelled from the Flight Attendant’s line of time.  If no such assignment is available at that time, the Flight Attendant will be pay protected under Section 21.N. and will be relieved from further obligation on the days of the flights cancelled…

There are additional provisions included in Section 10.T, we encourage Flight Attendants to read the entire section found on pages 43-44 of the contract.  You can access the contract on the AFA Alaska website at http://afaalaska.org/contract.

SEA-SJD Charter Turns in November

Management hopes that flights will resume operating to SJD by November but has anticipated that the infrastructure in the local community will take some time to repair.  Consequently, there will be no layovers in SJD in November.  In the process of rebuilding pairings, management was unable to build the SEA-SJD-SEA flying on four Saturdays into a sequence that did not involve a layover in SJD.  As a single sequence, this turn exceeds our scheduled 10:30 duty day maximum.

The MEC has granted management a one-time exception to build these sequences into turns that will be bid, paid, and scheduled as charters despite the fact that they contain scheduled flights.  These charters will be bid outside PBS using the FA Charters conference in FirstClass and will operate on November 8, 15, 22 and 29.  If you are interested in bidding for these sequences, please watch for them to be posted in the FA Charters conference.

Questions?

Please reach out to your Local Executive Council (LEC) Officers if you have any questions regarding the pre-cancelation language or how it applies.  Contact information can be found under the Local Councils menu at http://afaalaska.org.

In Solidarity,

Your MEC—Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow and Stephen Couckuyt