Popped online today to make sure that I had the right dates on my work calendar for PTO in May, got the dreaded "red letters" advising me of a manual schedule change consultation with the Gold Desk.

Turns out that all of the GEG-SEA flights have had some minutes added onto the arrival time - ranging from 5 mins to 10 mins (mine was padded by an extra 8 mins).

I can understand this for the winter, but since 2005 the flights out of GEG to SEA have been clocked at an hour during the spring/summer/fall time periods.

The extra 8 minutes knocks out my all-F (paid) routing from GEG to KOA, since it's now a 32-minute connection, which violates the 40-minute minimum in SEA. It's not that I dislike QX, but if I'm gonna pay for F I want to ride on a mainline aircraft the entire route.

The aircraft for the 7:00 a.m. departure comes into GEG the night before, getting in at 11:59 p.m.

They haven't adjusted any of the flight times heading to GEG from SEA, just the other way around.

Any insiders have thoughts as to what the heck the scheduling department is doing? Is it that difficult to find an open gate in the morning that an extra 5 to 10 mins has to be allocated to the flight time?