Saturday night I was working flights in the South. We had an aircraft get hit by lightning coming into Nashville (BNA), so we needed to fly it empty to Dallas (DAL) for an inspection before we could carry revenue passengers again. Separately, we’d sent a flight crew to Dothan, AL, (DHN) to drop off one aircraft for heavy maintenance, test-fly another one that had been checked out, and fly it back to Dallas if it passed its test hop. This left us with a problem: one missing aircraft in Nashville and two extras in Dallas. We would’ve been forced to cancel a early flight in Nashville Sunday morning, resulting in lots of unhappy passengers. But our captain agreed to fly the checked-out aircraft to BNA instead of DAL to balance out the fleet and prevent the cancellation. That might not sound like a big deal, but understand that he had specifically agreed to go out to Dothan and back and was expecting to sleep in his own bed Saturday night. Instead, he stayed in Nashville and returned to Dallas the next day. He could have refused to change his plans and left us short in Nashville, but he didn’t. Once he took off for Nashville, I sent him a message thanking him again for his help. His reply said it all: “That’s why I came to work for SWA”.

I found an interesting article on some problems with the seniority system used by most work groups at most US airlines, with special focus on the pilots at Delta and Northwest. Those airlines’ potential merger is on hold and potentially dead because their pilots can’t figure out how to play nicely together.

Seniority plays a role at my job, but it’s not quite as important. We bid for our work schedules and vacations by seniority once a year (don’t ask). Many of my colleagues look forward to the year they become senior enough to work the day shift or get Christmas off. The bottom 20 percent of the seniority list (I’m scheduled to rise above that threshold in May) are designated as “reserves” and aren’t guaranteed a consistent start time or the standard 6 on-3 off-6 on-3 off-6 on-6 off rotation that everyone else has. In addition, our pay is completely based on our job title and length of service, which is related to seniority. In other words, whether I’m a fantastic dispatcher or an average one, I get paid the same. Finally, when you’re in training, seniority within your class helps determine when you get to upgrade from Assistant Dispatcher to Dispatcher and work your own flights. It’s not a terrible system, and it seems to work fairly well for us, but I definitely see more value in rewarding merit rather than seniority.

I think part of the problem for seniority-based positions is that it’s difficult to fairly measure merit. Pilots spend most of their time flying throughout the system without a supervisor watching them. It’s just not practical to have that much oversight, which makes it difficult to evaluate which pilots are great and which are just OK. Similarly, I work with very little supervision. In fact, since I work overnight, the managers generally are not there when I’m there. They trust us and empower us to do the right thing, relying heavily on our good judgment. A chief sits with us once a year to review some of the policies and make sure we still know what we’re doing, but it’s certainly not a true performance evaluation like most employees at Headquarters receive. Right or wrong, basing pay on seniority keeps things simpler and keeps the unions happier.