Originally Posted by
flensr
There is one way to make $400k/year flying only once a month, but it involves a little more work.
A senior captain showed me how it works, with the contract and various scheduling/trading tools. Basically it's a "cartel" style operation with a very senior guy managing the trades. Trades go up and down the pyramid like a big money laundering scheme. A senior guy bids on open time premium he doesn't want, then gives it away to someone more senior than him (explained to me that this is the only legal trade whenever seniority determined an award). At that point it's laundered, and the senior cartel trip broker now sells that trip down to more junior pilots for a small commission, keeping only the trips he personally wants for currency.
Also, trips can get split up which adds TFP for deadheads, picked up premium, then recombined by the senior guy which preserves the extra tfp and premium and again, sold back downhill.
Does it really happen? I dunno, it makes a great conspiracy theory.
However I"ve heard FAs talking about the exact same thing plus on 2 separate base boards I saw printed flyers actually advertising the sale of premium trips for $50 or more, so I know that stuff sort of like this actually does occur, at least on a small scale.
So... yea, theoretically a "cartel" member could make a ton of money and not fly much at all, depending on their position in the pyramid. In reality? Nobody actually doing it will admit it to anyone who isn't buying into the scheme, yet everyone seems to know that one guy who is the smartest guy in the room who seems to make a lot of money for not flying much at all, who also has a lot of "friends" he trades with.
Without some sort of trade scheme going on, I also don't see anyone here making $400k flying one trip per month. Spirit has some scheduling contract rules that allow a senior pilot to create a lot of paid conflicts during the month so I could see a really senior spirit pilot *before their new contract* making a ton of money by bidding conflicts and playing various scheduling games, but not here.
This exact scenario may have happened long ago, but those loopholes have been closed for better or worse.
I don’t condone cartel behavior or any pilot doing anything that harms another union member.
The obsession with restricting cartel activity, however, has cost the 99.7 percent of pilots who play by the rules money and QOL due to silly restrictions put in place to prevent it. If we aren’t careful, we will restrict ourselves even more.
There will be a holes in this pilot group who will selfishly utilize things that are allowed by the contract to further their goals at the cost of their brothers and sisters. They will always exist because they are shady individuals and will justify it by saying it was legal so it is ok. You just have to know that eventually the universe has a way of sorting it all out.
Those who make gobs of money at SWA are generally hard workers who take advantage of opportunities. I work more than average so that my daughters won’t have college debt. Some guys go through rough divorces. Some are saving for retirement. Some are just greedy. Some made bad decisions and have debt up to their eyeballs.
I am glad I work for a company that allows me to either hustle and pull in some side bucks or lay back and relax but make less. Let’s not screw that up by putting a bunch of restrictions on ourselves in the name of ending the “cartels”.