What is the deal?!?! Trip trades submitted right at 9:30 Mempho time and still not processed 2:30 min later This is completely ridiculous. How hard is it to schedule one extra person for this one particular day each month? BRILLIANT!

Is this happening in all seats and bases or is it just MD11 FO seat?

 

Pretty much been standard ever since I have been here. You are not a priority unless they need you to be.

 

You want to trade with my schedule? Go away for several years then maybe we will offer you a right seat someplace in some base on some plane with some crappy catering an impossible contract to understand meaning and intent that is constantly violated and the chance of another furlough while our in-house scabs fly FAR limits and have that BS cop attitude and a CEO who holds you in contempt.........

Oh with a worse trip trading system.....almost all trades are denied.....

Your MD seat sounds pretty good right about now...let me guess you are based in warm snow free LAX and you complain about the traffic.....

Just kidding about all of this.......but I think it had to be said

 

Real time trading sure would be nice.

Maybe this should be a priority for negotiations.

 

Real time trip trading is absolutely positively required. And, if they can't buy more servers for the dreaded "VIPS SERVER BUSY" during open time release, they need to separate out the widebody airframes and stagger them every 30 minutes or so.

Goose17

 

The MD-11 is already separated from the other widebodies by 30 minutes.

By not having real time trip trading they at least triple the amount of requests they have to process.

I hear SWA has a good trip trading system, ALPA should look at it and offer it in negotiations. (Minus PBS of course.)

 

Southwest's system is awesome!!! Calendar, swap window, and open time all on one page to look at and make the swap without having 1400 windows open. Plus, if you put in for a trip which is illegal, it tells you and won't let you do it...

 

Well, I guess the servers are completely inadequate then. Maybe it would help to even further seperate out the planes/crew positions. It really sucks when you NEED to get a trade/drop in and you get the repeated message of "VIPS Server busy". That combined with trades that can take anywhere from 5 minutes to until the next morning makes for a frustrating experience.

Goose17

 

Don't even compare FedEx to SWA. Everyone knows they have one of the best real time trading systems made available to pilots.

Maybe it's because they make so much more than FedEx and can afford the expertise of perhaps several "high dollar" tech gurus to figure out it's smart to separate the flight planning website from the trip trading website....No that ain't it.

Maybe it's because management and the 777 boys think it should cost an hour or two of the "large new plane payrate" to work any improvements. We can't possibly have that. They're only making 110 hrs a month for goodness sake! Possible, but it's hard for me to be that cynical.


The more likely answers -

SWA likes to schedule efficiently because they run lean. Let trip trading happen and folks may even call in sick less. Somehow they think it saves money. Those fools. FedEx like to run a little fat so they can go to 4A2b and push enough folks to FDAs when necessary. Can you say part time major airline pilot?

If it's not that then it's due to just a few brainiacs that break out in a sweat anytime they get near a computer. Their heads hurt when they think about any changes to our trading system that don't involve automatically assigning open time by seniority. After all, they don't want to miss Monkathon or Murder she wrote reruns.

 

That would never happen at my airline.....

I guess being on the road 19 days month is not so bad after all....