A warm welcome to all of the newest among us who have come online and begun their flying careers! We are currently entering some of our busiest flying months of the entire year, and some of the situations encountered at these times while on reserve can challenge even the most experienced of our members.

Next Reserve Seminar on Zoom
On occasion the Component Reserve Committee hosts an online “how-to” / reserve rules seminar, and given how many new Flight Attendants and Service Directors have come online as reserves in the last few months we are overdue to conduct another one. We are pleased to advise that the next seminar explaining the “how-to” of reserve and your contractual rights will be conducted on July 18, 2023 @ 10h00 Pacific Time / 13h00 Eastern Time via Zoom. The presentation itself will go for 60-80 minutes and then will be followed by an open question period for everyone’s mutual benefit. All union members are welcome to attend. The meeting link is as follows:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87697465157?pwd=WG5hTEJTMDdDbW9FTXZyYTkrTGdGdz09

No preregistration or passcode should be necessary in order to join the seminar, but please reach out if you have any difficulties accessing the room. We look forward to seeing you there.

Scheduled Deadhead Extension to Home Base
Let’s talk about the scheduled deadhead extension to home base described in B5.02.02.02 of the Collective Agreement and what it actually means, because it is among the most conceptually misunderstood terms within our Collective Agreement and we are seeing more and more pairings now with this built into them. Once we have covered a concise definition of this term, we will provide a series of binary questions that will allow anyone who answers them to understand when a scheduled deadhead extension to home base applies to their pairing. So then, we will break this term down piece by piece in nonlinear fashion, starting with the easiest piece and ending with the most difficult piece. In order for the scheduled deadhead extension to home base to apply to a duty day, all of the involved pieces must be true concurrently.

First, we have deadhead; this is self-explanatory.

Next, to home base; this indicates that the flight leg / segment needs to be taking a crew member back to home base at the end of their pairing.

We then go on to scheduled. This means whatever is showing within a duty day as of the moment it first begins; any changes to a duty day after it commences are not scheduled.

Finally, we have the most difficult piece: extension. By default in a domestic duty day, such as when going from one crew base to another, the duty day limitation is 13 hours (B5.02.03.01). An extension is created when a duty day is extended by up to two hours in a handful of circumstances. The most common is when pushing back from a crew base en route to a non-crew base, in which case an extension is created to allow a crew member to remain on duty for up to 15 hours until they next arrive at a crew base (B5.02.03.02). There is one other less common extension, and that’s the one we are about to explain with all of the pieces put together: the scheduled deadhead extension to home base.

In order to be considered a valid extension for a domestic duty day, a deadhead leg would need to extend a crew member beyond their standard duty day limitation (13:00) but not beyond their absolute duty day limitation (15:00) while taking them back to home base. Stated differently, if one were projected at 13:00 or less prior to the deadhead and with the deadhead added they were projected past 13:00 but at 15:00 or less then a valid extension has been created.

Now that we have covered all of the pieces, here are the questions to ask to determine whether the scheduled deadhead extension to home base applies to a duty day:

1) Is the leg in question a deadhead?
2) Is the leg in question to home base?
3) Is the leg in question scheduled?
4) Does the leg in question create a valid extension prior to the commencement of the duty day?

If the answer to at least one of these four questions is no, the domestic duty day limitation will remain at 13:00. In a different situation, if the deadhead has been placed in a crew member’s schedule as their final leg back to home base before the duty day has begun, and if it has projected their duty day past 13:00 to 15:00 or less then a valid scheduled deadhead extension to home base has been created and raises the domestic duty day limitation for the operating crew member to 15:00. The same logic is applied to a standard overseas duty day, where a valid scheduled deadhead extension to home base increases the duty day limitation for an operating crew member from 14:00 to 16:00.

As always, if you have any suggestions for topics to address in future reserve committee updates or if you have any reserve-related questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to reserve@accomponent.ca as needed.

Happy travels!

In solidarity,

Jesse Matthews
Chair, Component Reserve Committee