Originally Posted by
Timbo
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 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.
There is no reason we couldn't have a single source for all open time, into which we could trade trips, as long as we respected max pick-up, if the Reserves Required were not manipulated as they once were. In that case, you could do everything you describe above. Throw in a decent interface, and you could pull trips from PBS that met certain parameters, and show what trips you might be willing to accept instead, and the pot could probably be used as giant, tarnsparent, trip exchange.
The reason guys want the sawp board, is because they didn't have a good means to effect an honest transaction, and can't trust Swap with the Pot (for good cause). If guys had an easy way to input trips they might be willing to give up, and what they would give them up for, it could match the guy looking to be on the other side of the trade. You wouldn't even have to look up the guy you need to trade with, or waste your time scanning through boards, only to find someone willing to give up a GEO for an ATH.
The current system for assigning/trading open time is archaic, hard to use, and detrimental to the pilot group. It needs to be gutted, then torched, the ashes need to be burried, and the ground it's in needs to be launched out of earth orbit.