Originally Posted by sailingfun

When we had a real cap your pay in a month could not exceed the cap unless you had a GS. If the cap was 75 hours and your actual credit for the month ended up being 82 hours you only got paid for 75. The 7 extra hours rolled over into next month. When you reached a point where they could drop the shortest trip on your line in a month and not put you below the cap then that drop was mandatory and automatic. So if you carried in 12 hours in bow wave and your line was 74 hours with a 10 hour two day as one of the trips you were now projected at 86 with the bow wave. The two day trip would have to be dropped and you would then have 76 hours. This automatic trip drop also applied in the current month to reroutes ect.. that generated extra time. I once had a 1 day trip turn into 7 days. All the credit caused the rest of my trips that month to be dropped.
In conjunction with Bow Wave we had spillback. If you had a month you did not feel like working a lot you could take any trip in the following month departing before the 10th and spill it back to the previous month to fill that month up. You could then pick up more that month. A nice feature when you wanted to build some big off time blocks.
The beauty of bow waves is that it removed all incentive to try and work more unless it was a GS. Back then we used 14 to 15 pilots per narrow body aircraft. Today its 11 to 12 and the aircraft utilization is up. Jobs are way down.