I argue with Tony more than anyone but I think he has a point about our access taking a beating over time.

FedEx IT has been going backwards in time when it comes to our ability to trip trade. No one but crew dogs care because the rest of flight ops and the corporation is going the other direction. Thank goodness they upgraded our deviation system and e-mail. That was a serious problem

Failure to process trip trades increases the number of transactions that would naturally occur. What should be one transaction turns into many.

For example -

Several good trips look to be available in open time. You, and other crew members, put requests in for the best trip so that creates 30 to 100 requests. Probably more in the big bid packs. Then each crew member keeps putting in requests for trips on the same day because they don't know if they got any of their previous requests. If there are 10 trips available then you have just created about 1000 requests.

Not to mention Scheduling's answer to dropping R days. They say "just keep trying, the system might allow it as the day gets closer". Sure enough the algorithm changes at some point then you drop it. Not a hint of it until you get the approved message. Why not show some type of code so we can actually SEE the system change. This would eliminate tons of useless requests.

No matter what they say, the number of transactions is 100% the fault of scheduling. There are easy ways to reduce them to less than 10% of what they see now.

I think scheduling is afraid someone might be let go if they get more efficient.