All First year FOs can get paid second year rates on anything they pick up from the company. So if you are a first year guy you want to clear your board and just pick up trips from the company. The big catch is what flying environment are you in? Historically if you are new you are flying weekend reserve and its hard to give those trips away. Now that the company is about 200 or so overmanned you can give away trips but now its hard to pick up stuff from the company because there are no extra trips to be found and with a seniority based system you are at the bottom of the bid line.

 

You make an interesting point here EWR. Historically the pilot group at SWA is a little undermanned. It allows guys that really want to work to get the work and allows guys to just fly their line if they want. There sometimes are grumblings when it comes to committee guys grabbing trips that they are technically illegal to fly. Thankfully we don't have anyone furloughed right now. I honestly do feel bad for the poolies but I believe the responsiblity of the company and union are for the pilots that are on campus now.

Hopefully with a little luck the economy will turn around and ALL airlines will be hiring again soon.

 

Nothing changed in OAK on the FO side, besides the crappy lines. Lots in giveaway, netzero still at 0. Hard to get any JA though.

 

ELITT is our web based program for trading trips with the company. You can only trade, not drop, and certain productivity measures apply to make sure that it's usually more productive for the company for the trade. It's good for trading up for better paying trips or slipping your schedule to try to get a certain day off but still work the same number of days. ELITT operates on 1st come 1st served and has nothing to do with seniority.

1st year dudes get the good deal of getting paid 2nd year pay for anything they pick up in open time (does not include ELITT). Open time bids and awards are done daily and are subject to seniority. In the past it wasn't too hard for a 1st year guy to pick up some open time if his schedule allowed it. Right now it's almost impossible as the senior guys are the only ones with a chance of getting open time.

There's also some more complicated ways of bidding monthly open time and then trading up on ELITT to make you trips pay more....but it's way too complicated for this discussion.

A good friend of mine made over 70k (according to him) his first year by very clever use of open time pick up and ELITT. I'm sure you could even make more if you sat at the computer all day plotting out your trips and if we weren't so overmanned currently.

 

DAL in a net zero +24. It use to just bounce from 0 to 1 and back to 0. Last summer when ELITT would open it would be -12.