This is the SWAPA Ride Report for Friday, February 23rd, 2024. 

The SWAPA Ride Report is your source for headlines, updates, and answers to frequently asked questions regarding your new Collective Bargaining Agreement. 

I’m your host, Tony Mulhare from SWAPA Communications.

First up, a reminder that the annotated CBA can be found in the contract corner on SWAPA.org.  There are a lot of moving parts and updates in this process and that is your most comprehensive source document for the latest information as implementation moves along following Joint Implementation Committee Meetings. Expect a new version of the annotated CBA approximately every other week.  It is important to ensure that if you have downloaded a copy of the annotated CBA there is an updated as of date on the cover page to ensure you have the latest and correct version. 

Let’s move on to some of the frequently asked questions this week, starting with some from Benefits :

  A pilot asks “does the new life insurance plan cover me while flying little airplanes?”

Yes, the insurance will pay but the AD&D has an exclusion about flying other airplanes and would not pay out, meaning the life insurance segment of $800,000 would be paid, just the additional $800,000 in Accidental Death and Dismemberment would not be paid.

SWAPA benefits will send out information on the new life insurance and AD&D plans once the company sends it to us.  Hopefully, this will happen next month.  

Finally, for those of you with questions on the cost of the Loss of License program, that answer depends on if you have selected the taxable or non-taxable election in the annual fall open enrollment period.  The taxable Loss of License plan,  meaning that you will pay taxes on Loss of License as normal income, is free and you won’t see a line item for it on your paystub. It is offered at no cost.  If you have selected the tax free loss of license, you will see a value on the imputed income section titled “Non Taxable LOL,”  You are probably wondering if that imputed income value will increase or decrease – and it will likely increase.  The reason being that the new LOL plan is uncapped, which raises the value of the plan.  How much will it go up?  SWAPA still hasn't received that data from the company yet and we will pass that information on as soon as it has been received.

Next up, Retirement: 

 First, if you have noticed a 401K contribution error from the ratification bonus payment, please reference an email from the SWAPA 401K Committee dated 21 February for more information.

Additionally, there will be no Market Based Cash Balance Plan spill cash this year. That will kick in once we receive the Private Letter Ruling from the IRS, which is expected to take 12-24 months.  NC member Damian Jennette goes into more specifics on this in the implementation podcast from January 1st.  These and many other high frequency questions are found on the 401K Frequently asked Questions page on SWAPA.org

In the world of Contract Administration, these were some of the most frequent calls fielded by the staff:

First up, when do New Hires stop bidding from the hard lines?  Well, new hires entering the April vacancy will bid from all lines and will no longer have a hard line held for them in their first bid period after IOE. BWI, this one's for you.

Next, what are the new short notice call out provisions for reserve? 
A reserve on a short call out will be paid premium for day 1 starting March 1st, and close in parking has been expanded to include premium ride share.  It’s also important to note that it doesn’t matter if you acknowledge a short call the day prior, you KEEP all these protections. Note that the premium will likely be added as an XTR nonfly during the assignment audit, so you might not see the premium value right away for the short call out.  See CBA Section 13.M.3 for more detail.

 And also, why aren’t there more turn lines in the bid packet?  I thought 5% of lines were required to be turn lines…the answer is while that is close, it isn’t quite true.  In Section 9.H.7 you’ll see that a minimum of 5% of domicile pairings are required to be turns, not 5% of lines…words matter.  But, we do have an agreement that 50% of domicile turn pairings will be grouped into lines with no more than one non-turn, which is meant to mitigate the sprinkling of turn pairings into 3- & 4-day lines.  As some of you know, those don’t tend to be useful to our commuting pilots.

 Finally, Contract Admin has been fielding many questions about paid parking.  As part of the joint implementation effort, SWAPA needs to correct a misconception about this language.  Paid parking will be provided in your domicile, or, you can reimburse up to $60 per month at a commute station in lieu of paid parking at your domicile.  The intent wasn’t meant to cover both but that was misconstrued in the implementation education and our negotiating team dug back into the notes to verify the agreement that wasn’t as clear in the language itself.  So, to sum up, it’s either or.

Moving on, here is the latest from the Schedule Research Committee:

Members of the SRC attended the company Scheduler training session last week to discuss 1 March implementation items.  Notably, SWAPA was given the chance to talk through the upcoming changes and answer questions 

A common point of confusion right now that both Contract admin and SRC are getting asked about is your pay total.  As a reminder, LCO is tallied independently of your pairingpay, which is intentional and by design so that it isn’t absorbed by rigs and so it doesn’t get included in your CAP calculation. ALWAYS go to your payroll report to verify your TOTAL pay which adds in the LCO values.  

Another note from your SRC: There’s been lots of questions about whether putting a pairing into Trip Trade Give Away is considered notification of the assignment.  While there are new provisions in Exchange of Flying that do qualify TTGA postings as notified, Crew Scheduling is still working out a process to enforce this.  Their tentative plan is to check throughout the day for TTGA postings and marking them as notified, and while our implementation agreement was DOR for this change, Crew Scheduling plans to formally enforce the requirements on March 1st.

So, if you used to try and give away a Reserve assigned pairing by putting it into Give Away prior to acknowledging the pairing in CWA, scheduling will now mark you acknowledged as part of their work flow.  That means you need to report for your pairing without waiting for an additional call from scheduling.

Additionally, The SRC would like to point out that third party bidding programs, like Crew Bid or WBid, use different definitions of AM and PM pairings and pilots need to update their settings in the bidding programs.  According to our CBA section 26 Bravo three, Pairings are classified as AM or PM based on duty period report times.  Some of the bidding programs only use first day check-in time as the defining parameter and that is not contractual.  Check with your bidding software provider on how to update your filters and settings.

That’s all for Q&A this week. Just a reminder, a more robust Q&A can be found at SWAPA.org, along with all the resources for the CBA under the “Contract Corner” tab.  

Thank you for joining this week’s ride report. If you missed anything during this week’s report, a summary will be in your inbox soon. Fly safe, fly informed.