Originally Posted by CargoCan

This may or may not shed some light on one reasonable reason to block a training swap.

A few years ago I approved a training swap. For the uninformed reader, the result is someone junior to me moved to a training slot earlier than mine and someone senior to me moved to a slot after mine. I was happy with my training date and was very happy to help others swap slots.

Here is where things get interesting. Shortly after the swap the training letter disappeared for a few days and a new training letter came out with new dates. The junior pilot was still ahead of me and now all of a sudden so was the senior pilot. My training date was now delayed for one month. As I waived passover pay when I approved the swap the company had no reason to move the junior pilot behind me. The senior pilot is always going to be senior to me and so moving him ahead of me is totally copacetic (even though it wasn't what he wanted). So now that senior pilot has my old training date and I'm delayed one month. No big deal except that I now have the second to last training date before training stops for 3 months because of peak. Now I don't mind a one month delay but a four month delay... that doesn't work for a number of reasons beyond the scope of this explanation.

So pretty soon after the new training letter comes out I get an email asking for another training swap approval. Not surprisingly the senior pilot still wants a later date. He didn't want to get moved earlier but that is what the company chose to do because other names where added to the letter that probably would have generated passover pay for him.

This time I apologized but said no. He was very polite but also persistent so the discussion continued for a few days during which the company changed the training letter again moving me to the last slot before the long break. I apologized again but refused.

My only motivation was wanting to go to training +/- six weeks of my slot.