I’ve had very good success using swap with the pot. Unless it’s a holiday, the reserve formula deals with the sum of the negative numbers so there are lots of options if you can find a worse day that you are not working.

As you get close in and the trips start to break up, the reserve staffing can really go negative. That’s when you swap with your trips later in the month.

Don't discount IVDs. IVDs are very valuable as well, you get 2 plus an extra one for each extra vacation day awarded from the sick leave incentive. Lot of categories get 4 IVDs this year. You have to have vacation left in the year to use them though.

Pickup a trip late in the current month that conflicts with a trip early in the next month. Drops the trip in the following month regardless of reserve coverage.

Helps tremendously to live in base and you have to constantly hawk Icrew.

I’m sub 80% in category and have only had to do a 4-day trip 3 times since March.

One of the many reasons I miss iCrewMax! So much better of a display than what we have now.

I'm gonna miss EZ Swap and Widget Works, the companions to EZ Bid. Are there any other options for trip sorting and mass uploads of blind swaps? EZ Swap was good for at least one schedule improvement every month for the last decade plus.

100% agree on this. Widget Works paid for an entire careers worth of payments for it the first month I had it. Couldn't believe more pilots didn't use this stuff. Will be interesting to see what happens once ARCOS handles the white slip stuff down the road.

How do you define a commutable trip? Start after when, end before when? It seems it would be subjective depending on the pilot.

I always wondered what crew resources and ALPA use for that definition as well in the crew resources news letters.

What does this mean?

How do you use swaps to get an unwanted trip off your schedule? Not talking about swap board. Obviously you can drop a trip with that, but nowadays nobody wants to pick up much there.

As an example, You swap a 2-day trip that has days with a higher cumulative negative reserves available than a 4 day trip.

2- day trip
Day 1 15 required 4 available
day 2 10 required 4 available

4-day trip
Day 1 15 required 12 available
Day 2 14 required 10 available
Day 3 10 required 6 available
Day 4 12 required 8 available

The 2-day is a cumulative -17
The 4-day is a cumulative -15

The swap would go thru.

Or for a real world example. There is a 2-day in NYC ERB right now, starts on the 18th, commutable on both ends, 1 leg to SJU, 1 leg back. Cumulative -35 on reserves. You could swap a 3 or 4 day from many dates the rest of the month and it would go thru.

Thanks for the example!

So the effect of the swap is ... you fly the two day trip you just "swapped into" and your four day trip later in the month drops off your line and into open time?