Originally Posted by Zoomie

Great for you. Please give some data on your demographic to the OP.

What we have here is an "outlier". I don't have a comprehensive analysis of all bases, but this poster most likely fits into 1 of 2 categories.
1) Upper 30% of seniority in his category (737 SFO, 737 ORD, etc) which I'm guessing is true since he started a monthly schedule with 19 days off. Looking at 3 different FO bases for Jun, I saw maybe 1 or 2 with that many days off starting.

2) He hustles quite a bit to get his schedule to this point. We have a few tools that you can use to trade significantly to make your schedule better. I'd say these tools require a great deal of effort each month to get them to improve your schedule to be this way. Can it be done? Yes? Is it as easy as the hustle at SWA? Not based on my own straw polls of friends at SWA.

Overall, hopefully there will be some posters here that will have some experience at both SWA and UAL to give some better perspective.

My own opinion is that most pilots at SWA tend to have at least 15-16 days off per month without much effort at all as a jr lineholder and from what I understand reserves at SWA get min 14-15 days off?

So my gut feeling is the "typical" SWA pilot gets on average about 2 days off more than a typical UAL pilot. That adds up. That's 24 days off a year. Because of this flexibility, I'd say typically a SWA pilot will pick up a trip or two here and there to add to their schedule and make a bit more $$. You can do that here at United, but almost no flexibility when you have 12-13 days off. You can't go below 10 days off because of our contract as the union doesn't want pilots to go below that amount of time off. If you only have 12-13 off, impossible to pick up a 4 day (which is most of our flying). If the company built more 2-3 day pairings, that would go a long way to improve QOL, but for some reason it doesn't.

In addition, because of the way SWA builds their schedules, you go to work and work your tail off. You have to be senior at UAL to get a schedule this way. A lot more unproductive schedules where you work 1-3 legs a day with 2 being average on the NB. We've tried to get rigs to force a more productive schedule, but it never seems to work out since we just don't turn aircraft as efficiently as SWA.

For me: I'm an instructor at our training center. I get 13 days of 90 hrs every month 12 months a year. It's a grind, but it allows me to be home 95% of the time but with early/late training schedule being a con.