Originally Posted by NuGuy

Just to put the above post into a little context:

DAL Pilots have fairly extensive and flexible ways to modify their schedule via adding, dropping and swapping, both with open time (AKA "the open board") or with other pilots ("the swap board").

The ability to drop trips is predicated on the reserve coverage for each day of the trip. There is a formula that calculates reserve coverage required each day of the month based on historical data, and it changes based on a number of factors, including how much open time is on those days. That's all automated, so there's no putting a thumb on the scale. The other number is "reserves available", which is what it says, the number of reserve pilots available on that day...mostly.

If the number of reserves available is greater than the number required for all days of the trip, you can simply drop the trip outright, and that's called a personal drop (PD). There's no limit on this, and you can drop to zero if you want. You can then be off, pick up something else, etc over those days. You can also place a trip for pick up on the swap board, and if someone picks it up, you're scott free. Both of these are automated.

The wrinkle is if the number of reserves available is less than required on any day. In this case, there are a couple of "silver bullets" you can use. The first is an "authorized personal drop" (APD), which you get one per year. It lets you drop a trip that only has 25% of the reserves available vs required. You get up to four days of APD, but you only need one to drop a trip (or 2 2 day trips, or 4 1 day trips) or up to 4 days of reserve. The issue with APDs is you cannot do anything else on an APD day (no pickups).

Individual vacation days (IVDs) work exactly the same as APDs, but you can peel off days of a future vacation to do the same thing. You get 2 uses per year (occurrences, IE individual trip drops), and you may use up to 6 days vacation. There are ways to get more occurrences if your category wins a sick leave contest (sigh, no, I'm not making that up), but generally most people get 2 per year, but it can be as high as 4.

It's a pretty flexible system, and for the most part, it's totally automated.