Yesterday, United announced that service to Tel Aviv will resume on March 2nd from Newark. The first two departures will operate with a tech stop in Munich before the planned transition to nonstop service on March 6th.
For the last several months, the MEC Officers and our MEC Safety, Health & Security Committee have been participating in a cross-divisional working group composed of individuals from various operational divisions across United to ensure we are prepared for the eventual resumption of scheduled service.
Our overall focus has been to ensure the safety and security of crewmembers. Utilizing previous experience, we have worked closely with our ALPA counterparts to identify process and resource improvement opportunities that we determined were necessary to ensure the safety of crewmembers. We are happy to report the company has adopted many of the recommendations that have been made.
We recognize some Flight Attendants are not comfortable, for safety or security reasons, traveling to Tel Aviv at this time. We have worked with management to memorialize a process that has been used in the past that will allow a Flight Attendant to decline a TLV assignment. This applies to Lineholders, Reserves, Reassignments, and Drafting situations. An overview of the process, which will be in effect until 30 days after the first TLV flight operates, is provided below.
- A Lineholder expressing safety/security concerns about flying to TLV will be removed from trip(s) to TLV without pay protection, on a trip-by-trip basis. Flight Attendants wishing to be removed for safety/security concerns should notify Crew Scheduling no later than forty-eight hours (48:00) prior to report for the trip in question. Flight Attendants will be able to pick up other flying (non-TLV) over the original trip footprint.
- A Reserve expressing safety/security concerns about flying to TLV will be skipped from the assignment to the trip to TLV and remain subject to assignment TMAC as prior to the assignment of the TLV trip.
- A Flight Attendant reassigned into a TLV trip expressing safety/security concerns about flying to TLV should be bypassed without a loss of pay and remain eligible for reassignment to other replacement flying.