How Flight Attendants Get Their Assigned Schedules
I cut a chunk out of the second Margaret book this week. I needed to "cut down on details that are eating up page count without moving the story forward." Rude, but fair. This was one of those annoying editing decisions where I liked the section very much and still knew it had to go. Irregular Operations in Omaha eventually needs Margaret to get on an airplane, land in a blizzard, get trapped in a hotel with a bunch of passengers, and discover that one of them is dead. Spending several pages first explaining the mysteries of flight attendant scheduling was, apparently, delaying the murder.
There was another reason I had trouble deleting it: if you've ever worked for an airline, a lot of what I shared here is going to feel immediately familiar. If you've never worked for one, you've probably wondered about this: How does a flight attendant know where they're going? Who decides? Can they choose? Why does one flight attendant seem to spend half her life in Paris while another one is doing five legs a day through LaGuardia?
Welcome to Flight Attendant Scheduling 101.
It's December 2008.
The first thing you need to understand is that your seniority number is one of the most important facts about you at an airline. It does not care whether you're charming. It does not care whether passengers love you. It does not care whether you are exceptionally good at your job, have an impeccable attendance record, make beautiful announcements, or can somehow get a full beverage service done before the seatbelt sign comes back on before a particularly windy descent into Omaha, Nebraska.
Seniority is basic math. When I was hired by Delta in March of 2008, three classes of twenty-four flight attendants started on the same date. Seventy-two people. We were the combined "I" class because classes A through H had already started before us, staggered through the beginning of the year.
Within our group, seniority numbers were assigned in order. The oldest person got the best—meaning lowest—number in our group. The youngest person got the highest. If two people shared a birthday, last names became the tiebreaker. This means your entire airline career could theoretically be affected by the precise moment your mother went into labor decades before you ever filled out an application. (Tell me astrology isn't real after reading that.)
As new people are hired below you and people above you retire, quit, or otherwise disappear from the list, your relative position improves. Very, very slowly. That number controls an extraordinary amount of your working life. Trips. Days off. Vacation. Whether you can hold Christmas off. Whether you can hold international flights. Whether you can plan for kids' birthdays. Whether you get stuck with four legs a day, long rides to hotels, and short layovers. At a large airline, the difference between "this job is incredible" and "I cannot believe I have made these life choices" can sometimes be just a thousand seniority numbers. It can also be as small as a handful of women you have known for your entire career at a small but important base (Orlando, I'm lookin' at you).
The time of year impacts seniority and scheduling in very drastic ways. Summer was generally glorious. The schedule was full. International flights operated frequently. People wanted time off. Trips moved around. Flight attendants dropped things because they wanted to use their benefits and go meet a friend somewhere. There were long layovers, lots of flying, plenty of opportunities to pick up extra hours.
Winter was when junior flight attendants discovered the other version of the job. Some international routes dropped from daily service to only a few times a week. Seasonal flights disappeared completely. There were fewer total hours of flying available, but roughly the same number of flight attendants trying to get them. Suddenly the senior people weren't dropping those Amsterdam trips. They were holding them. Firmly. With both hands.
Winter was when your seniority number walked into the room, pulled out a chair, sat across from you, and said, "So. Shall we discuss your expectations?" At Delta, we used an online system called iCrew. Once a month, thousands of flight attendants logged in to submit what were essentially prayer requests to a giant computer in Atlanta.
Please let me have weekends off.
Please give me Rome.
Please don't give me Fresno.
Please let me fly with my friend.
Please don't make me report to Newark at four in the morning.
Please, for the love of God, no five-leg days.
You were allotted bidding points, and you could spend those points expressing your preferences. Maybe you cared about destinations. You would apply tranches of points on areas as general as regions of the globe, or as specific as airport codes for Amsterdam, Paris, Nice, Pisa, whatever you thought you could hold. Almost like a gambler, you could look at previous schedules for any seniority number, and see what they held. You were making bets that you were putting more weight (seniority + bidding points) on your requests and hoping your peers and those senior to you were not bidding for those routes, too,
Maybe you cared about avoiding short layovers. You could bid with parameters like "avoid [number of hours] [or fewer] layovers" but you could also say "unless [Detroit, Philadelphia, Hartford] airports" (for example, those were my personal preference for those particular layovers because those airports have hotels inside the airport, and I don't have to touch the outside weather. I like not touching the cold ever.
Maybe you hated working a particular position. You never wanted to fly as a Flight Leader (the lead flight attendant, or the A position) on domestic flights or be assigned the B position on international flights (that's the aft galley that services Economy and it is not considered light work).
Maybe your entire bid was built around your wedding date or getting your daughter's birthday off.
Side note: I was so mad in 2013 that I couldn't hold my wedding day off, despite all of my points being spent trying to avoid just one day, but instead of respecting that they gave me LITERALLY AIRPORT STANDBY, but let's be honest, there were many other issues with that date being set, regardless of Delta's lack of indulgence for me holding a Saturday in June off as a 5-year flight attendant.
* takes a deep breath. releases it. * Okay. I'm okay. I'm good.
Maybe you cared about absolutely nothing else except not seeing one particular coworker for the next thirty-one days. You could literally bid "please not this one person" with all your negative/avoid points. I didn't understand it then, and I can't begin to explain it well now, but trust me, it was VERY specific, granular detail. It was almost like gambling, but not.
The computer took all those requests, stacked them on top of contractual requirements, operational needs, available trips, staffing levels, and—most importantly—seniority, and attempted to create schedules for thousands of people. With that in mind, calling this process "bidding" gives the activity an air of control that may be slightly generous. You could ask. The computer was under no obligation to care. Our bids were due around the 11th of the month, then we just...waited.
The following month's schedules were generally released around the 18th. Officially, they might appear around midnight. In practice, if you were junior enough, you could be sitting in front of a laptop at three in the morning hitting refresh like you were trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets fifteen years before Taylor Swift tickets became a combat sport.
Then the schedule dropped. Pure digital chaos. People immediately started trading trips, dropping them, swapping them, picking up other trips and trying to turn whatever the computer had given them into something resembling the life they had requested in the first place. The senior flight attendants had way better options and they were still catty as fuck amongst each other. The junior flight attendants had "character-building opportunities."
My own schedule in December of 2008 included something called Access Days, or A-days. Access Days meant that for a block of days, Delta owned me as a stopgap option for anything that went wrong for a 72 hour period. I could be assigned STBY or Airport Standby, where I would sit for four hours at a time, dressed in uniform and sitting in the flight attendant lounge at JFK, LGA or EWR. I prayed to never sit standby at EWR. That was my first ever standing "forever bid."
When I didn't have airport standby, and was just on a list of On-Call Flight Attendants that Crew Scheduling had available to them, for three days I didn't necessarily know where I was going. I didn't necessarily know when I was going. I didn't even know if I would be going. I just knew I needed to be reachable and ready to work because Crew Scheduling could assign me a trip.
If I got lucky, I would find out the night before and could rest secure in the knowledge I had a specific wake up time and could prepare adequately for the length of flight and layover(s). If I didn't, I slept lightly with my phone beside me, waiting for it to ring.
The rest of the month, the twenty-four or twenty-five days I wasn't on call, I knew my schedule and could make any adjustments I wanted to. I could even put in a request to scheduling to just outright drop a trip, leaving it to them to assign someone to later. I could give away any trip that someone was willing to trade me another trip for or just take off my line. I could get rid of all of my trips except for the bare minimum of 30-ish hours (depending on the month) or have none at all. I could pick up trips other people had offered on an exchange. I could stack my schedule with as many hours as I legally (according to the FAA) could work, or get rid of as many as possible and fly zero hours for a month, as long as I had a yearly average number of hours.
If it sounds messy, it probably is. I wouldn't want to tackle the algorithm for it, and I think it did a reasonably good job as long as I was there. I manifested all of the adventures I wanted, so it worked out in my favor!
