Originally Posted by
RockyBoy
It was the system that CAL developed. You basically had an initial line improvement window before schedules became final that allowed you to swap with open time for 24 hours. After that they finalized schedules and then it went to a secondary window that was first come first serve with live trading all month long. You saw a trip you liked, pick it up. You wanted to drop a trip and coverage was good, you dropped it. It took 10 seconds to approve or deny the request. At XJT these windows did not honor seniority. It would be easy to structure two windows that allowed requests based on seniority then after those were done you could go to a live trading first come first serve window. I would even go for a system that honored senioriy and did PCS runs at least hourly to satisfy the seniority issue.
The nice thing about live trading (or shorter PCS runs) is it creates alot of "churn" in open time as guys drop/trade stuff they don't like. The open time changed daily as the month went along unlike Delta where it stays virtually the same all month long because there is little to no churn. The only time it changes is within 48 hours of the trips that are coming in, and by then we are not allowed to swap for them. We could swap for anything up until it was assigned to a reserve or two hours prior to report of the trip because it was a live trading system. Trust me, it was nice and it would be nice if we could get some of the Delta guys to not be terrified of change. Senior guys would also love it if they gave it a shot. They can improve their lives just as much as the junior guys.
Then again, a lot of us came from a place (ASA) where open time was run 3 times a week and was always subject to a scheduler's whim despite the coverage. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's no room for improvement. However, I think the 3 times a day run is probably much better than industry average when it comes to schedule modification.
In the span of two PCS runs today, I completely unscrewed up the schedule that my own bid idiocy, combined with my juniority, created for me for February. I don't see much of a problem (of course, I'm new to all this as a DAL-N guy....)
Not to say that there's not room for improvement. I'm all for making it better. But, it ain't so bad. Now, if we could only get email notification when a trip popped up into open time (*ahem* ezopenboard..) then life would be good!