Originally Posted by
ShyGuy
Ok. But now what does that senior CA do? What does it matter if Mr. Smith flew those trips or Mrs Smith flew them? Either way, Mr Smith was senior to me so I couldn’t get those trips anyway. It’s a moot point. Question is, if Mrs Smith is doing his trips now, what does Mr Smith do? Staying home unpaid? Taking crappy trips from open time?
Sounds like a selfish argument. By that logic, you could never allow vacation trading, nor trip trading. Why stop at just vacation? Why not hunt down every trip that was initially awarded senior to you, and then traded away to someone more junior to you?
Seniority was honored when that vacation or trip was originally assigned. After that, trading means all bets are off and it’s a free for all.
For trip trading it has to be a trend. Mr Smith gives all his good trips to Mrs smith. Mrs Smith no longer has to fly all the undesirable trips that all her classmates have. Mr. Smith opens his schedule to accept more 200% flying (which is awarded in seniorty). Sure you can give away a trip or two but if it’s a complete schedule swap every month then that should be addressed.
The Hawaiian vacation system you can request vacation all year. There’s really no need to trade. I guess you could always reach out to someone and tell them you will be vacating a certain period and ask them to vacate their vacation in return for the info.
It kind of sounds like vacation isn’t much of a thing at Alaska. You either end up selling it all back to the company or picking up over it. If you do the math. If 2,000 pilots sell back 100 hours of vacation then that is 200,000 hours less labor that the company needs to hire. Being able to work more and credit a billion hours isn’t always a good thing. What’s better getting 70 hours credit as a Captain or 100 as an FO?