Captain Bligh

I have a few questions:

1) How are trip trades handled at your airline? Particularly, is there an option to swap what ever you have for something better should it become available after the monthly bid award i.e. because of a sick call?

2) How is it determined which pilot gets that trip if more than one pilot wants the same trip at the same time?

3) How would you handle the situation if you believed that a few pilots unfairly had first pick of those trips, out of seniority order and possibly using methods not available to the pilot population at large?

dojetdriver

It's just a regional, but here goes;

After the line awards/line adjustments for transition/training are done, ALL transition/training/vacation/attrition trips fall into open time. CA's go first, usually on a Tuesday. FO's second, Wed. Initial Line Improvement Window (ILIW) opens up. Usually takes place in the second week of the month. The ILIW is open for 24 hours. And yep, you can pickup or trade realtime all your trips for whatever is in open time. No crew scheduling interface. If it's the same days for the same days, very very easy. Moving days off around can be complex and takes a lot strategy. It's all first come first serve. Days can be moved around/dropped if reserve coverage is high enough on affected days, rare. But if guys are picking up trips, that creates less need for reserve coverage for the days of that trip. So the window is very fluid for that 24 hour period.

Before furloughs and downgrades, it was a feeding frenzy. Imagine how much open time is created with 600+ lines of flying with a line bid system? My crap non commutable working weekends off schedule could get turned into weekend off/commutable with clicks of the mouse. Another trick if you can't move days around, you can advertise your trips. If they get picked up, you're free to pick up whatever you want without causing an FAR/contractual issue. Used to have a "trading floor" (measured in credit hours for the month) to which you couldn't trade under. Not sure if it's still used.

What's left after that process is used to construct the secondary/fallout/relief/buildup/composite/mix lines. After that is sorted, usually in the last week of the month, the Secondary Line Improvement Window (SLIW) opens up. It's open from that point till the end of the following bid period. Same rules apply as the ILIW, the scale of which it takes place is much much smaller.

Now, big disclaimer. Since we've furloughed and gone to reduced flying lines, much of that changed. All the same rules apply, but less open time to choose from.

Again, first come first served. Some guys literally camp on their computer waiting for better stuff to drop into open time from a sick call, blown commute, etc.

We did have a situation like you explain above. Scheduler got fired, pilot(s) got to keep their job(s). Call contract compliance and tell them what is going on. Assuming it can be proved. But it probably can.

Thread drift, if we went to PBS, most (ALL) of that very pilot friendly trading stuff will go away.