Then I guess I'm not clear on why you haven't dropped your weekend trips and picked up the great weekday trips that are just sitting there waiting for you? Honest question.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure. Besides, a lot can come up between last day to put in bids and the end of the month. Sometimes it’s just trading one good (but non-commutable) trip for another good (or almost as good) commutable trip that gets you in an hour or two earlier. Saves you a night in a hotel on your own dime.

Big money difference? Not so much. But sleeping in your own bed tonight as opposed to buying a hotel night and losing a morning of time waiting to jumpseat home is not a trivial thing either.

Obviously. But that other trip is gonna look good to someone, and get picked up. Or traded for something worse, and then worse. I've watched a good trip drop (on days I already have a good trip) and within second or minutes it's gone, or traded for something less good. That second trip is traded quickly for something less good. And so on. Anything good is eaten by the hyenas until only the bones are left. "Good" trips are eaten up by seniority in the bid, and then those who couldn't hold those trips because of less seniority eat them when they fall into open time. They never just sit. To suggest they just sit there is to suggest that everyone that couldn't hold those trips originally because of their seniority will now just look at them and go "oh well, I guess I'll just fly the crap my seniority could hold" and not trade for them. And I've watched FLICA enough to know it happens fast.

There's a reason that NK pilot put out the spoof BOT selling website... To deny it is just silly and beyond reasonable belief.

What do you think BOT stands for? Bot… short for robot…

I’m sure we have people with bots, but so did my previous airline. Using a bot is scummy, but I digress.

What would be considered a bad trip at JB?

It's because different people like different things. Your good trips are someone else's garbage, and vice versa. It's a beautiful thing.

Our system maximizes the chance that everyone ends up with something they like.

I'm going to disagree with that partially. A **** trip is a **** trip is a **** trip. We all know what a bad trip is and we all know what a good trip is. Now we may have preferences of types of flying, layovers, report times and computability, but a bad pairing is always going to be clogging up the open time pot and nothing will completely change that.

Yeah, no one likes the 10 hour 3 days with a redeye.

Very rarely in a group of 1500 CAs or FOs are you going to get unanimous agreement as to what is a good or bad trip. But saying nobody can improve their schedule by trading trips is simply crazy. And even if that were true on the day you put your bid in, things change by the time seven weeks go by.. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want the ability to swap their schedule around if new conflicts present themself. And yeah, that may mean dropping to a lower credit value and taking a less desirable trip to make your kid’s soccer game because they made the playoff or something. I don’t know anyone who can reliably predict what dates they want off six or seven weeks out. The ability to drop/swap/pickup. Is as necessary to pilots QOL as many other work rules..

Shhhhhhh… a handful of JetBlue pilots with seniority to bid what they want are drunk on the idea of fat profit sharing checks and no matter how much the varied benefits of drop to zero are extolled to them will scoff, feign disbelief, or otherwise endeavor to poke holes in its value. The merger will eventually get approved. The SIL will go forward within standard deviations of the mean. Eventually we will have a combined NC try to sell us on a JCBA where something has to give. For me, money can always be made but lifestyle can’t be rebought. If a majority tend towards the dollars vs the freedom, it better be so much money that any tears for what we sold are dried by the dollars.