Dear LAX Flight Attendants,

Lots of news for our base already this year. Here is a letter from LEC President Sandra Morrow with some highlights.

Union Meeting

Wow it’s spring already!!! Your LEC is busy preparing for our April Union meeting. We have scheduled our Union meeting for April 16, at Long Beach’s Recreation Park, 700 Federation Drive, Long Beach, CA from 11:00am -2:00pm. We wanted it to be fun and informative so it will be held at a park with a potluck. AFA will provide the entre and beverages, and we are asking each of you to participate and bring a side dish, appetizer or dessert. Please RSVP to Kelese Stallings at kelesestallings@yahoo.com and let her know if you will be coming and what you are bringing to the potluck. This will help us get a head count for the amount of food we will need. Also don’t forget to bring a beach chair.

I will be attending the Board of Directors (BOD) meeting on April 27th-30th in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Constitution and Bylaws require all councils to bring forward the agenda items to their members. You will have the opportunity to review and discuss each agenda item at the union meeting with the LEC officers.

We are excited to have Kristy Stratton, Negotiating Committee member, attend the meeting and hold a Q&A session on the new contract. Please send your contract questions prior to the meeting to David Lehman at lehmaninla@yahoo.com by April 11th. We want to be able to answer as many questions as possible and having this information in advance will help expedite the process. After the meeting we will post the questions and answers in the minutes on the MEC website (afaalaska.org) for those who are not able to attend.

Parking in LAX

AFA and the Company have been in discussions about the parking at the Westin. We know how unreliable the vans have been and we were happy to see that there was a change starting March 16th. The Westin has told us that there will be 4 vans every hour and they will not be stopping at the Sheraton. The Company has agreed to a trial run for the next month to so see if this works out. We have heard from you that the Westin is your choice of parking as long as the vans are reliable. However, if this does not work out the only other option is the D lot. Please give us your feedback if the new shuttle system at the Westin is working out. Also as a reminder, even though we cannot use Thrifty we are able to use Fox.

Local Scheduling Chair

We are looking for a volunteer to become our LAX Scheduling Chair. This person will be the advocate for our LAX schedules. With our new contract we formed a new MEC Scheduling Committee. Congratulations to Jake Jones as he was appointed by the MEC as the new MEC Scheduling Chair. Jake is a Seattle FA and was a member of the Negotiating Committee. He works on behalf of AFA and is an advocate for the FAs. The local Chair for LAXFAs would be working with him and other chairs from all other bases. If you are interested please contact me at sleemorrow@verizon.net by April 30th. Please include a short bio and why you are be interested in the position.

We are also excited that LAXFA Sherrijon Gaspard has been selected as AFA’s pairing analyst. She will be taking Jeff Stein’s position. Jeff has work in that position for the last 10 years and we thank him for all of his hard work.

Attention LAX Reserves: Update Your Co-Terminal Preferences

Beginning on March 1st, 2015 Crew Scheduling has begun to assign trips out of Co-Terminals in order of your preference and not necessarily in LTFA order. What does this means for you? Prior to this change Crew Scheduling was not required to look at your Co-Terminal Preferences unless there were two Flight Attendants who had the same TFP on the LTFA list. Then there had to be two trips that needed to be assigned (worth the same TFP). The odds of this happening were very rare, and primarily only happened the first couple days of the month. With the new change you no longer have to have the same TFP and have two trips worth the same TFP in order for schedulers to look at your Co-Terminal Preferences.

For example:  A 2 day AM trip out of BUR

There are 4 Flight Attendants who are good for 2 AM days. The LTFA will still show those Flight Attendants in TFP order. The Flight Attendant with the lowest TFP will be looked at first. If they designated BUR as a preference, then they will get assigned the trip. If they did not preference BUR then Crew Scheduling will move on to the next lowest TFP and look at their preferences. If no Flight Attendant good for 2 days AM report has BUR listed as a preference, then the trip will go to the Flight Attendant with the lowest TFP on the LTFA list. There may be times where a 2 day BUR trip gets assigned to a 3 day BUR Flight Attendant in order to grant a Co-Terminal Preference but this is at Crew Scheduling discretion.

Co-Terminal Preferences are generally live. However, preferences are “frozen” between 2pm and 6pm PST the day prior while Scheduling is assigning all the trips in Open Time. The LTFA preferences cannot be changed during this time and the button to submit the changes is deactivated. It is recommended that if you are going to change your Co-Terminal Preference you DO NOT wait until 2pm to make those changes.

After 6pm PST the day prior the LTFA preferences are “unfrozen”. At this point Crew Scheduling works off of live LTFA preferences. When Crew Scheduling is looking to assign a trip they will take a snapshot of the LTFA list. It is possible that if you update your LTFA preferences right after that snapshot is taken your new preferences will not be honored for that assignment because the assignment is being made based on your (only moments ago) old preferences. In this case AFA will not hold Scheduling at fault for not assigning based on the updated LTFA.

We hope this is a great step forward for LAX Reserves…we understand how hard Co-Terminal flying can be.

Looking forward to seeing you all at our April 16th, Union meeting.  In the meantime fly safe!

In Solidarity,

Sandra Morrow
LAX LEC President

Contact the entire Local Executive Council (LEC) and visit afaalaska.org 

Sandra Morrow, LEC President – sleemorrow@me.com
Kelly Johnson, LEC Vice President – laxvice@aol.com
Kelese Stallings, LEC Secretary – kelesestallings@yahoo.com
David Lehman, Council Representative – lehmaninla@yahoo.com