Originally Posted by
Tropical
Actually, there is a way to do that here. They call it "trip parking". In our trip swap system, you can designate "friends" and trade trips back and forth. So you would "park" a trip on a friend's schedule, which gets you below the threshold to pick up another trip. Your friend drops a payback day on the trip and gets paid for it, it drops back into open time. You pick the trip up again via whits slip, then trade it back to your friend. He drops the same trip with a PB day, and you pick it up again... so on. A couple pilots last year credited over 1000 hours in a month doing this, but that's holy grail stuff, everything would have to align perfectly
Payback Days are earned if you take a GS on reserve on an off day. This is what we call "rolling thunder". You can only do it in busy low staffing months (summer) and you have to be senior. You bid reserve, GS on off days, put the PB days on your next reserve day, which becomes off days, then GS on those days. By the end of the month you have a crap ton of PB days plus all reserve GS pay 100% above guarantee, so you could credit way above 100 hours on reserve, and then use the PB days later as said above.
This isn't 100% trip parking, since the trip does have to make a pass through open time. Because of that, there is always a chance someone senior with a generic request grabs the trip and blows up your program,
Back in the day, you could just park it on someone else's schedule with the pilot to pilot swap system. But, of course, there were some that were doing things that were pretty obnoxious and called attention to what they were doing. Because of that, there are now restrictions that force a trip picked up via pilot to pilot swap to pass through open time before it goes back to the person that it originated from.