Originally Posted by
baseball
1. Is the trip trade mafia still alive? I ask because it seems some pilots in particular are able to get and see the trips that pop up with great "efficiency." is there some sort of back-door into the trip trade system that we should all know about in order to make it more fair?
Yes. I've seen trips that are not advertised for PP disappear for 5-15 minutes from open flying and then get assigned at 100% before anyone could reliably put in a pickup request. I've also seen trip numbers change to defeat my auto-pickup based on trip number (they added an A at the end even though it was the same trip) and another guy magically had that trip number and got it.
And don't bother to ask to audit the crew schedulers phone calls because I believe these are all happening off line (personal phones). Not sure if there is any compensation going back, but at least there is favoritism as far as I can see.