Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
That's exactly how a senior pilot should do it, but in your category with the size of some of your trips you can probably do it better than mine. The key is not to be available on a weekend on mine, if you are, you're flying. So you just have to bid weekends off and as many days off at the end. It can be done but there is a limit.
Because the thing is if you get, and this happened to me last month, if you get lumped in with the weekends ON group during the week (say only be available for 3 days starting mon) then out you go. You want to try and hide in the 4+ day available crowd for as long as you can if you're senior.
On the WB's it works totally opposite of your last paragraph. the 5+ day crowd has historically done the SC's to bidding three day weekends was the way to fly one trip a month, generally in the second or third week and one SC, when the coverage was so low that they had to use a pilot in the 4 day bucket.
I flew one trip last month and one SC. The trip was because it was to sucky to pick up and the SC was because no one else was legal in my bucket. This month I am a line holder with close to a max credit line and I am no where near the top of reserves.