MaxKts

Do you speak from experience?

FLMD11CAPT

On preventive regimen........

MD11HOG

Heard about this on the crew bus. somebody set up a forum for guys to track and spread info on this problem. fdxxtrapairing.org.ua
Landing Page

cp44fla

Any website that prefaces joining with those first two notes is enough to scare me away. Yes, it sucks what they are able to do but is an entire forum dedicated to complaining how they always get a sweet deal really that attractive?

Mark2792

That just makes your face turn red. My kids were doing that last week~

USMCFDX

Grabbed this from another thread that had UAL council minutes. Looks like they have the same problem we do.

AMC Charters – Open AMC charter flights are now being listed in open flying as CLE 747. If you want to pick these trips up, you must call the Charter Desk. We are still receiving many complaints over the seeming unfairness of the process. Using the CLE 747 category is a step towards automating the pickup of these assignments, but, unfortunately, so far it has not changed the perception that the same handful of pilots pick up every charter.

hollant

HEY, DUMB A$$e$, quit flying extra! If it is in open time, let it sit! Come up to Alaska and go fishing, it's way more fun!

phuzzyz

I can't take credit for figuring this out but it seems to make sense.
What these guys do is when trip trading for the next month opens they trade their entire month for one six hour trip and at the same time put in make up requests, dbl dh, intl, 5 day min,etc. for every day of the month. They then have a large positive balance in their trip trade banks. When something opens that fits their parameters it's assigned to them and frozen until they can acknowledge the notification.
For some reason this trip trade bank has priority over other categories of trade and make up. The down side is that these hours disappear at the end of the month if not used, no carryover like general makeup.
Anyway, that's what I was told. If true then those guys weren't doing anything illegal, I'll leave the ethical question up to others.

busdriver12

That makes zero sense to me. If you have a large positive balance in your trip trade bank, what does that have to do with being assigned makeup trips with priority, and trips being frozen until you can acknowledge them? They are two different banks, completely unrelated to the other.

I can see dropping all your trips to clear out space to get a trip, but the only reason you'd trade down is so you can pick up volunteer on those days also (can't get volunteer on days you've dropped). That would be a completely bizarre glitch in the system, and seems that wouldn't require any investigation to figure that one out.

Adlerdriver

I don't think the process includes some special priority we are unaware of. Technically the deadline for general makeup requests is 0900 LBT the day prior to the trip. Anything submitted later can still be processed at the company's discretion.

At 1000 LBT, scheduling can start assigning trips in priority order (M/U is ahead of reserves). So if a trip comes open, for any reason, for the next day and it's already past 1000L, the scheduler may immediately assign it to the guy with a general M/U request (assuming it meets his criteria).

Depending on how the day looks, other open time, other fires to put out, scheduling may not even wait long enough for that trip to show in open time and activate everyone's auto-notification text messages (or whatever they're using). So, by putting himself on general make-up, that pilot is simply making himself the right guy at the right time if something comes up short notice. I have no idea how often that works on a consistent basis, but it worked for me last week.

Thanks to my juniority, I didn't get very much CIC payback when I knocked out my entire schedule for Jan conflicting training with R-days. I was down to 18 CH for the month. So, I put a general m/u request in for last Monday and Tuesday. My only constraint was an 8-day max trip length. Monday morning I woke up thinking I would hawk the sick calls at 0700 for Tuesday. When I checked OT (via BidX) at 0656, there was already a trip I could live with in OT. It was the only thing in OT and there were no frozen trips. I quickly submitted a makeup request, also using BidX, and then logged in to PFC normally. By the time I was logged in, I already had a crew notification. I assumed it was for the M/U request I just put in.

It was for another (better ) trip that had been assigned sometime between Sunday evening and the point I saw it at ~0700 Monday morning. The trip was for that same day (Monday) and showed in 8 hours from the time I acknowledged the notification. Luckily it was a front-end DH.

My point is, I checked OT prior to acknowledging the crew notification and my trip wasn't in OT showing "frozen". It simply wasn't there. So, the theory that the trips show "frozen" after they're assigned to someone via M/U until they acknowledge the assignment does not appear to be valid.

The other takeaway is, if you're willing to be flexible and put some constraints to protect yourself, a general M/U request can get you access to pop-up trips your wouldn't otherwise get just "hawking" OT.