Originally Posted by
Sink r8
A lot of the abuse could be fixed simply by eliminating the swap board. I know that statement fits into some people's plan like a cold, cold wind blowing through and wiping out the stuff they've gotten addicted to. But the reason we had to go to the board in the first place was that Sawp with the Pot had become completely useless due to the abuse of Reserves Required formulas by the company. So the unintended consequence of having a poor system to swap with open time, has been to allow pilots to fly much, much (much) more than max pick-up.
A good Swap with the Pot, with rational restrictions, would keep everyone honest at or below max pick-up, and wouldn't allow those that whaure for the flying to add insult to injury by trashing the staffing.
I know this very idea infuriates a bunch of people, but at some point in your career, you've got to look around, realize your friends are turning tricks, with white stuff on their nose, and you've got to wonder if it wouldn't be better if we could get our dignity (and our staffing) back.
I agee with your intent, to eliminate trip parking, but I use the Swap Board lots of times in a -legitimate- way. Usually, I use it to move a trip a day or two over, so I'll put up a same-trip swap, just a day or two different, because Mamma threw something at me last minute, after bids closed, and now I need a different day off.
In the 'before time', we could swap trips, same trip only, no time diff. on your line, pilot to pilot, but we first had to call the other pilot on the phone, get him to agree to it, then call crew scheds, they would manually swap the trips (same time only, not higer/lower time trips) and sometimes they would even call the other pilot to be sure it was legit.
So it was a huge PITA, but nobody was parking trips to get 110 hour lines. Oh, and we had a monthly cap, anything above 75 or so, went into your bow wave for next month's bidding, or you could put it in your 'bank', to be taken out at your leisure.