Originally Posted by
gasnhaul
Bus,
It actually was a swap. Pretty sure the system won't let you do more than one trip against the one you are swapping so I had to wait for the approval/denial before trying again. I was under the impression trip pickup worked the same...is this incorrect? Thought I remembered the system not allowing me to put in for more than one pickup during the same timeframe say Friday morning. Something to do with a request already in the same date/time. Again I'm somewhat new and this is only open time I'm talking about so it's entirely possible I'm wrong about some/all of it��
Nope.
You have Trip A on your schedule, and there are 8 trips in open time that fit the same footprint and you'd prefer any of them over the one you have. (Maybe it's a location you abhor, or maybe it's got a D/H and you would rather poke your eyeballs with a red hot needle than take the 4:59, 2-leg D/H in an RJ.) You submit 8 swap requests, listing them in the order you prefer.
SWAP A for B
SWAP A for C
SWAP A for D
SWAP A for E
SWAP A for F
SWAP A for G
SWAP A for H
SWAP A for I
And then you start waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
Finally, hours later, you get 3 Notifications at once. They could be:
You've been REMOVED from Trip A.
You've been ASSIGNED to Trip B.
Your swap with Open Time was APPROVED.
Yeah, you won!
More likely, they will be:
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245876 [Unless you wrote it down, you have no idea which Trip that was] was DISAPPROVED Earlier Time Stamp.
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245881 was DISAPPROVED Earlier Time Stamp.
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245883 was DISAPPROVED Earlier Time Stamp.
So, you figure the first 3 SWAP requests were a waste of your time, but you still have to wait for the others to be processed. You research and learn that Trips B, C, and D have been assigned to someone else, but Trips E, F, G, H, and I are still listed as OPEN.
Finally, you get lucky. You have 7 new notifications.
You've been removed from Trip A.
You've been assigned to Trip E.
Your swap with SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245885 was APPROVED.
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245892 was DISAPPROVED Not on Trip A.
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245899 was DISAPPROVED Not on Trip A.
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245904 was DISAPPROVED Not on Trip A.
SWAP with OPEN TIME REQUEST #3245913 was DISAPPROVED Not on Trip A.
In this small example, that's 4 requests that are made and have to be processed because we don't have Real Time Trip Trading. With RTTT, the pilot would have stopped as soon as he got a SWAP approved.
Multiply that by a few more schedule tweaks per pilot, and then thousands of pilots, and it's easy to see why a computer should be doing this and not a scheduler.
(Same thing goes for picking up trips. Make as many individual requests as you like, and if one of them is approved, the rest will be disapproved because you're already on a trip for that time.)
.