Originally Posted by
Quarryman
It may be by design. Remember, only round one eligible pilots can SAP. Lines haven't changed much. So, for example, if there were, say, 55 lines available in DC only 55 pilots could SAP. Assuming DC grew to 57 lines over the past two months then that's an additional two eligible pilots who can SAP, yet performance degradation has been substantially worse now than it was two months ago. The actual numbers may be different but we aren't expanding the number of eligible round 1 pilots by much in contrast to the progressive decline of system performance.
My guess is there is a manual element to the SAP. It is just a guess but perhaps there is a scheduling person going through these trades and either approving or denying them? 60 eligible bidders x 50 requests per bidder is 3000 submissions. Effortless for a computer but could take hours for a human (and we aren't even accounting for the smoke breaks).
It seems that if someone else is awarded a line you also are asking for, the denial for anyone else who asked for that line is somewhat automatic. But who knows, when someone else gets the line you wanted, it is unknown what time they put in for that line. Is the extremely long delays from this SAP something that is grievable? Once, a crew scheduler told me they get busy if there is weather or other things that cause flight delays and they have to stop working on the SAP sometimes. Makes me think the staff that is on duty just assumes SAP and no additional staff scheduled on the 15th and 16th to help out.