dckozak,

Sitting at home and having your trip cancelled or holding for an hour inbound and missing your next hub turn is one way most of us may have experienced substitution. There’s a big difference between these scenarios and the trip extension that keeps you out for a while.

Unfortunately, you treated this as if you were actually available for substitution in a normal “availability period” which is when you have the option to decline a sub trip and get OTP. You were out on a trip which is a totally different animal.

There is actually a whole page devoted to this scenario in the pilot calendar. It’s the page to the left of the substitution flow chart and is labeled “Sub & Overage Options Due to Trip Extension”. The flow chart is for somone considering their options while sitting at home or in domicile after they just found out their next trip is no longer there. It's not where you want to be looking when you're already out on a trip.

When you’re notified of the conflict, you have to choose one of the 3 options listed (overage, sub or OTP) and you have 2 possible deadlines for that choice. With a short sub window, if you want OTP, you need to make that choice no later than the show time of the trip in conflict (the one you would be electing OTP for).

If you don’t want OTP, you have until 30 minutes after block in from the trip that was extended to choose either the overage for the extended trip or substitution. If you do nothing, the default is that you elected substitution.

In your scenario, you didn’t have an “initial availability period”. You weren’t available because you were still out on the extended trip. The availability requirement only applies to someone who has the option to be “unavailable” – i.e. a pilot not already out on a trip.

Since you didn’t make a choice prior to the show time of the trip in conflict, you didn’t have the OTP option any longer. When you’re out on a trip, you don’t need to have an availability period since they know how to reach you. If they have sub trip for you, it just needs to fall in the appropriate sub period in accordance with the contract. If you turn it down, then you’re declining substitution and you’re not going to get trip guarantee. You should at least get the overage for the extended trip.

I will caveat all this with that fact that I’m not contract enforcement and I may not have explained this perfectly. Also, since I obviously don’t know all the details it’s probably worth running it by an expert just to be sure.