I had a big lunch and felt like a whale. :D sucks being irresponsible.

I honestly cant remember the name of the operating system but maybe one of the other XJT guys can remember. We just called it CCS, not sure it thats technically what the system was called or now.

It allowed you to do live trip trade and we also had trip trade windows for adjusting our schedules. I rarely flew my awarded line and the way it was set up I could change my schedule throughout the month as better trips (better as in for me) popped up due to whatever reasons. As soon as a trip dropped in to the open time it would immediately be active for trading if that trip suited you better. This allowed everyone to monitor open time and build their schedules throughout the month that had what they wanted. You could trade 1 or all of your trips. i loved the way we could manipulate our schedules.

in fact, i think the system is a CAL system. Crew Communications System maybe - CCS

I just looked it says it has copyrights to Continental fwiw

Yeah, I know. Buddy was a SOB... difficult to work with! I saw him and his band perform years ago at the Wichita Jazz Festival (about 1978, I think). I guess they had some folks from the festival running sound. In the middle of one of the songs, there was a loud squeal from feedback. Buddy gave the sound guy one of those "looks that could kill". A few minutes later, it happened again. Buddy stopped the band and said (very angrily) into the microphone, "That happens one more time and we're out of here!" He sounded like he really meant it. It didn't happen again.

[quote=forgot to bid;747950]Group photo.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_uP82GDOf__...lete-fleet.jpg

If you need a bigger version: http://blog.delta.com/wp-content/upl...lete-fleet.jpg
quote]

Hmm, I want my job back, I see we have now painted N623US ;).Seriously, why did they include the 747-200 when it was never repainted? Btw, 6623 didn't even get the "new" NWA paint job, but was still sporting the bowling shoe:D

It worked great for those trip trades. Helped me to get a commutable line (eventually).

That's some serious DAL-ifornication!

I was wondering that myself, too. Maybe the picture just looks nicer with 2 whales up there. :)


The 9-30 and 40's also won't be wearing the flying widget either. I don't think any E_170's are outsourced for DL either anymore...

This is such an airliners.net moment for me. I'm going to go act like a CEO over there for a bit....

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.

there was nothing sweeter than finding a nice trip and trading for it on your own without calling or asking anyone. I could often trade around enough to boost my soft time up by 10 hours or more just by creative trading. Not to mention i could pick better trips all together.