10.06.25 – APFA BOS Base Brief – November 2025 Staffing and Allocations

November 2025 BOS Staffing and Allocations

Monday, October 6, 2025

Hello Boston!

The monthly staffing and allocations meeting for November 2025 was held on October 3rd. Here are the key highlights: The total headcount for the BOS Domicile has slightly decreased to 831, including inactive FAs.

The total active headcount stands at 806. We will not be receiving any new hires for November, so our projected reserve numbers are expected to remain unchanged.

There will be no VLOAs offered for November. November begins the ramp up for the holiday season.

Our flying hours for November are steady at 49,757, a minor increase from last month. This reflects about a 10% YoY increase from 44,891 in November of 2024. Our reserve percentage remains steady at 11.9% and we are expecting 96 flight attendants to serve reserve in the November bid month.

The sequence construction breakdown for October is as follows;

• Our LAX transcon flights return to our usual sequences.
• The morning trip is back to its usual operation.
• There is another time change to the redeye operation in November as the redeye flight pulls back to its usual 10pm departure instead of the midnight departure for most of October. With that said, the 3-day trip with the redeye return is back on the bidsheet.
• LHR will continue with its new departure times for November and the 29 hour layover. There will be a 5-day LHR over the thanksgiving holiday.
• The PHX rocket will operate 13 times throughout the month.
• There are no ODAN’s in the bid packet for November.
• There is only one charter sequence in the bid packet.

Of our 3 day sequences, 5.8% are sequences with two duty periods such as LHR, 24+ hour layovers, or two-day trips with releases after midnight.

Now, a note from your base council. As you can see from the statistics above, there has been a significant increase in our 3-day sequences. 48.5% is an egregious number, and we have expressed our extreme discontent with this percentage to the FA Allocations Department. We had, until now, maintained consistent, productive dialogue about Boston’s trip construction with a degree of responsiveness from the company. We had, until now, seen continuous movement towards parity in our one, two, and three-day sequence percentages. In turn, the base operated more effectively, and, along with solid attendance numbers, burned through fewer reserves, less often. To see this change, so abrupt, is unacceptable and unwarranted.

Our base operates best when we have relative parity of one, two, and three day sequences. This massive increase in 3-day trips encompasses nearly half the bid sheet. We have made that as clear as possible over the course of many emails and phone calls with the planning team. Their response? “Boston is overstaffed from the summer for the current operation the airline is flying at the base.” If that were truly the case, there are other contractual remedies available to establish a mutually beneficial allocation. Instead? They present a staffing plan and bid sheet that guarantees a month full of red-flag, empty reserve/ RAP lists, reserves flown into days off, and scheduling grievances.

We have made it as clear as possible that when the operation cannot support this bid packet, the blame will rest entirely on the shoulders of the Planning and Allocations teams at SkyView, not the Flight Attendants. When the majority of trips are 3+ days every sick call, every Bereavement Day, every PO requires more days of availability from reserves, yet the reserve count remained steady MoM. This forces Crew Scheduling to fly more reserves into Flex Days, break up more sequences, and makes it even harder for all Flight Attendants to receive POs when they have a last minute emergency.

Boston takes pride in its low reserve numbers and utilization. We have a very junior lineholder average, in part, because the membership understands that when we all do our part, it benefits everyone. Make no mistake, with this staffing plan, the company has failed to do their part. Their response? “Well, we brought it down from the originally planned 52%.”

BOS APFA will continue discussions with the Allocations department related to these concerns, and trust that any negative impact it has on the operation will be tracked and presented accordingly to those responsible.

In Solidarity,

Luke Williams
APFA BOS Base President
(617) 362-0052
[email protected]

Kea Serikaku
APFA BOS Base Vice President
(617) 362-0052
[email protected]

Ben Samoylich
APFA BOS Staffing & Allocations Representative
[email protected]