ELITT is trip trading with the company. Each month on the 25th it opens for the next month and in a flurry of about 20 minutes weekday and high paying trips are gone and weekend and min paying trips remain.

When too many people trade off of a certain day it turns red and no one else can ELITT away from that day.

I’ll also add that if you live in base and want weekends off reserve is a good option. I get most weekends off and I just finished year one.

ELITT is trading with the company. The company has a bank of uncovered trips at each base. If you find a trip you want in this bank you can trade like for like. So trade your 3 day for a 3 day from the company bank. It gets way more complex than this (you could trade your 3 day to a 4 day, while reducing one of your other 3 days to a 2 day) but basically ELITT is trading with company and TTGA is trading with other pilots.

Regarding Southwest, “Drop to Zero” is somewhat misleading. You can Give away your entire schedule to another Pilot(s) but you can only “drop” 4 duty periods a month back to the company. Not perfect but provides some flexibility.

ELITT, our trip trade system, is pretty effective. If you are not on reserve and you want weekends off, its there for the taking. Even for the very junior.

Another note, roughly 85% of our trips are 3 days or less. Not everyone loves this(commuters, vacation bidders) but not doing a 4 day every week has a remarkable effect on qol.

Is ELITT seniority based or FCFS?

First come first serve

Ahh, so that’s why junior guys are able to get better schedules with relative ease. If it was seniority based this thread would have a different tune.

There’s also a ton of trading pilot to pilot which is obviously heavily influenced by seniority. Many of the most senior give away/trade down so they can pick up premium trips.

That’s true. I am a newb, so I don’t have a long time here to compare my recent months to. My first year has been better than expected, but that would change quickly with leaner staffing.

I’m after the same thing.. quality above quantity. A lot can change in the next 5 years, but you should be able to hold widebody with ease at Yonited and possibly AA. (Parking 330’s 75/76 and 1-1 swap w 78) Sitting short call you might work what a trip a month? Friend in the 76 in PHL didn’t work for 183 days in a row. Widebody Short call is the gravy train w biscuit wheel IMO.

I have this to add as someone who did line bidding and lots of trip trading for a decade and now bids with PBS: I know PBS gets a bad rep, but the right system that is Union controlled isn’t terrible. I have much preferred PBS vs line bidding because I used to spend hours and hours constantly trading and swapping to improve my schedule. I would be at birthday parties, family outings, sitting at home, ect constantly on my phone checking open time and trading trips. Yes I was able to have great flexibility and drastically improve my schedule, but at what cost? I lost so much time constantly worrying about this. Now I typically get what I need right out of the gate and don’t waste so much time trip trading. If I have to make a change, I can make a trade here and there, or just put in a criteria trade and let it trade automatically if and when what I need pops up.

I will never miss having to dedicate a night of my life every month to trip trading, not to mention countless other days being “married” to my phone. We spend a lot of time with other “aviation families” that work under these systems. Their wives all say the same thing: “even when he’s home he’s not really home”. Just keep in mind it might be nice to have the flexibility but that may also require tons of time given up. JMO based on what I’ve seen of course.