R you sure, Jim?
DL FAs have been able to bid into each others bases for almost a year - shortly after the final labor ruling (I think it has been just a year). I have flown on flights that had mixed DTW and ATL crews.
WT, I find it hard to believe that a mixed base crew is anywhere close to commonplace at DL. First off, who deadheads to the start of the sequence/block/whatever DL calls it? If the trip begins in ATL then the company has to deadhead the DTW portion of the crew to ATL pos space or the plane can't leave. Same is true if the trip starts in DTW, the ATL portion of the crew will have to be deadheaded. And, if the start of the trip is an early morning sign-in then the deadheading portion of the crew would have to be deadheaded in the day before and provided hotel rooms for the night.
What is more likely is that you flew on an airplane that had a (let's say for the sake of argument) crew based in ATL. At some point during the trip the crew passed through DTW where one of the ATL f/as became ill. Crew Scheduling assigned a DTW reserve flight attendant who was sitting airport standby (some airlines call it ready reserve) to work the rest of the trip. That flight attendant must be returned to his/her home base at the end of the trip. Deadheading costs money because a seat is being occupied by a non-paying employee and in some cases results in a revenue passenger being bumped from the flight. It would be a serious waste of money to do this on any basis other than last minute substitution to avoid cancelling the next leg.
For instance, I just got back from such a trip. I am on reserve this month. A flight attendant crew from DFW was laying over in MIA. One of the flight attendants became ill. Because they had enough warning, I was deadheaded to MIA to meet the rest of the crew and work the rest of the trip. At the end of the trip which was past 2100 in DFW, we all went home. If they had put a MIA reserve on the trip, not only would they have to deadhead him/her back to MIA at the end of the trip, they would first have to pay for a hotel room in DFW because the last flight of the day to MIA had already departed.
Bidding into a base is not a regular occurrence, and all it means is that if I am in DTW and there is an opening in ATL and I have the seniority to hold it, I get to transfer to ATL. However, I am now an ATL flight attendant. I am no longer a DTW flight attendant. I never said that the flight attendants didn't have a combined seniority list.
And, if you mean by mixed ATL/DTW crews, you mean an ATL cockpit and a DTW cabin crew, that proves nothing. Very few airlines co-pair cockpit and flight attendant crews any more. U.S. Airways is one that does co-pair. However, it costs money because pilots have federally-mandated rest periods/layovers/duty days that the Feds do NOT require for flight attendants. However, if you copair they get those additional rest periods, etc by default. I just flew a trip late in January that was a 3-day trip, 3 legs the first day, 2 the second, and 3 the last day. Not only did we have a different cockpit for every leg of the trip, only two of the cockpit crews were DFW-based. AA schedules pilots and flight attendants totally separate. It is pure coincidence that you have the same cockpit for more than one day of a trip. And, don't DL flight attendants have preferential bidding. That would be a nightmare to try to copair because the flight attendants probably don't even have the same trips for the entire month.
