Trip trades or drops are nearly impossible (at least on the RW certificate). If you try to trade a 4 day for a 4 day operating on the same day in the same base, the software must first put your trip into opentime and instantaneously put the new trip on your schedule. Scheduling sets the minimum reserve coverage artificially high to negate this ability. So if you tried this trade you would be denied "due to minimum reserve coverage". I stopped trading/swapping on FLICA about 1.5 years ago with over 400 denials and ~5 approvals.

For vacancies we want the ability to bid on our own certificate (not consistently applied right now, see Q-400 bidding), and during displacements, to any certificate in our base and/or any base we can hold by seniority. Also, there should be a system-wide bid probably once a year.

The trip rig is useless for most trips. So either your company has a lot of 15 hour four days or your trip rig is also useless. We no longer have a pairing analyzer but 80 TAFB is common, under this rig, you'd get about 16hrs credit. That would not encourage efficient trips, nor would it compensate pilots reasonably for their time away from base.

However, more directly, the conflicts lie in micro-management and animosity. We do not trust our managers to do the right thing (morally or operationally). I've talked to quite a few pilots that would vote "no" to anything, just to punish the company for this abuse. Personally, I intend to vote "no" and consider voting "yes" on day 3 of the strike, if the proposal includes all the main things I'm looking for. On the other hand, the company does not like the union, and does not believe that the pilots are as ****ed as the union portrays.

In the words of Bryan Bedford. "We'll negotiate when there is a release [cooling off period]. That's the way the system works." --jumpseating in May 2010.