Hey all, curious about scheduling and 117. I've heard all the great things about WN and schedule flexibility.

I'm coming from ACMI where I lived on a 2 on/2 off schedule. Is it feasible to tweak a schedule to get at least a week to ten days off consecutively every month, even while junior?

Thx

 

Not so much on rsv unless you get someone to pick up a block. Once you have a line you can trade trips around to whatever is FAR legal.

 

Second what flyguy said about reserve, although it is possible with reserve elitt, it’s hard to manage with 4 day reserve blocks that tend to fall over weekends. You can definitely make 10 or more days off happen, but not as easily as a line holder, where it is super easy.

I think you are going to find that being in a large pilot group and a single fleet really allows you to tweak your schedule to fit pretty much whatever you have going on. Cross country commutes and weekend reserve notwithstanding.

 

Sometimes you can try to tweak your month end and start to get a gap.

 

I'm a person who utilizes long periods of days off. This month I have 11 days off in a row, and next month I've managed so far to get 16 days off in a row. If a trip appears in ELITT where I can move something to the end of the month (should happen eventually), I'll have even more off.

When bidding a line, you'll want to either avoid 4 days, OR bid an all four day line. An all four day line, especially on the blanks, can already have 10 days off.

When using ELITT, the best thing will be to get yourself away from red days ASAP and then try put two three days together, the first Thu-Sat and the second Sun-Mon. Weekday trips go very quick in ELITT, but if you watch the alerts it's possible. If you are super fast and/or lucky, you can drop duty periods in ELITT.

Other tools you'll have available are TTGA (trade or give away trips to other pilots), monthly overlap (get duty periods dropped when trips overlap month-to-month), vacation (should be able to turn one week into 21 days off, but won't get your full vacation until you've been here a full calendar year), training bid (could get two trips dropped without pay going forward) and finally sick time, if not having ten days off in block causes you to not feel fit to fly. Just don't post pics from your boat, especially as an FO.

It would be in your best interest once through training to read the SWAPA Scheduling Handbook thoroughly, and then look at the trip construction and execution parts of the contract.

 

have you ever seen non weekend rsv blocks in ellit?

This was my plan and I've been watching and concluded there is no chance I can reliably move a weekend to a week day rsv.
Possibly the other way bit I find there is only 1 pure week day rsv linsand I dont have the senority to get that on slow months. Yeah I bid in the top 10%

 

Reserve elitt is worthless with the BTC restrictions they built in, especially after the first couple minutes. Then its grid lock for the rest of the month until you SP the rap you couldn’t get out of.

 

👆 This right here. Currently trying to move a weekday 3 day block and have no chance because of the BTC’s being 0, even though my trade would add multiple additional RSV days to my board.

 

Honestly, I have only used it once, and that was to turn a PM block into an AM block and it was great. The thing about our reserve system is that there just aren't many weekday blocks, so the inventory is heavily skewed towards weekend 4 day blocks and won't let you trade out of weekdays because then it leaves them without enough coverage. So yeah....pretty useless but there nonetheless.

 

I say easy to do . Trade your reserve blocks for trips with other pilots and then you can move the trips around as you please. The pilots that get the scheduled that they want, put some work into it. We have pilots here that are complete socialist, they want everything handed to them. They feel no one should ever have anything better than them, under any circumstances. I’ve seen lots of junior pilots ( CA and FO) with great schedules and great vacation.