Originally Posted by
machz990
The way I see it if you have one or two days of carryover into the following month and you bid another low paying line, protecting min days off will do nothing. Example: A 60 hour line would be approximately 10 work days leaving 18 days off. 2 days of carry-in would yield 12 work days and 16 days off. Protect min days off and nothing would happen since you already exceed the min days off.
If your carry-in conflicts with another 1-2 day trip and the conflicted trip gets dropped (assuming a lot of pilots do this) you would end up with a slew of trips bunched into the first couple of days of the bid month. Can't build much of a line with a bunch of short trips all occurring on the first couple of days of the bid month. Most would end up in open time.
I will not argue that the short one or two day trips make much of a difference. But, you have to think about your logic. We don't have more trips on the last day and first day of every bid month; it is just the way the schedule was built. If our bid periods started on sunday instead of monday all of the small C/O trip would disapear and be incorporated into the follow on months schedule.
I expect a lot of the small C/O trips to go away in the near future as the optimizers realizes they no longer have to break up week long pairings in order to maximize the number of lines and reduce buy ups. It will be part of the slow reduction in hours between now and when they ramp back up next peak. 62 hours this month, 60 hours next month, and 58 hours the month after that. Kind of like boiling a frog, make the changes gradual and he will never notice.
It is a personal decision. I will not fly extra if the company is threatening to put guys on the street. You don't think your extra 6 hours will hurt anything; that is between you and your conscience.