Originally Posted by
m3113n1a1
Delta's trip mix is horrible. In order to hold day trips on the 737 as an FO in Atlanta you need to probably be top 5% and those guys are all like 20 years seniority or so. There are ways to drop your schedule and pick up broken up day trips, but that takes work and doesn't always work out. Somewhere like LAX there are even fewer day trips and you rarely see anyone with an entire line of them. It's not like an LCC or even a regional where once you get some decent seniority you can do day trips. Delta likes to build 4-5 day trips as much as they can.
Keep in mind the biggest single factor that governs trip mix is work rules. If you have very strong work rules credit time almost always forces longer trips. It's very difficult to pull long legs out of the flight segments to build turns without driving up credit on the longer trips and reducing overall trip value. I once worked with other pilots to show the company a better bid package could be produced. One of the goals was to create more turns and two day trips. One we pulled long legs for turns it became impossible to build the rest of the bid package without a substantial increase in credit. The flight attendants have lots of turns. They also have lots of 3 day trips worth 14:30 ect... If they had our work rules a lot of the turns would go away.
One last consideration. Prior to the last merger 5 day trips were considered to long domestically with regard to QOL. Post merger the company agreed to limit trips to 4 days. This produced a huge number of pilot complaints to bring back the 5 day trips. The company said fine, it helps with credit. Be careful what you ask for!