He means aggressive pick up on your reserve days. You basically bid for available trips and hope to be assigned the one you want based on seniority. With luck you can avoid a hotel this way

So you are saying that you can bid for trips over your reserve days? Sorta like a first out last out system? Is this the same on the WB fleets?

It’s the only time you can bid for trips as a reserve. It’s seniority based, with one limit—the trip that is in open time has to be generally equal to the number of reserve days you have available. There are some caveats to that, but the reserve system has been explained 1000s times in as many threads, so I’ll spare you the dissertation.

This^^^ you can also call the crew desk and request aggressive pick up on days off and/or pickup a shorter length trip when on a long reserve string… up to them to assign. I’ve done this in the past with success. Since they’ll roll your days off (1 for 1) if you aggressively pickup up a trip on days off you don’t lose anything… I used to do this as a commuter to not sit short call when a trip I’d prefer flying pops open.

How long does it take with the company to be able to bid a schedule like this?

Depends on which base you're at. Also, asking "how long" regarding ANY question, is pretty moot at this point. Things are changing every month.

It used to be that IAH was incredible senior for CA and FO. Now, just about every new 737 FO is getting IAH in indoc. "How long" is nearly impossible to answer.

Sorry, I guess the better question would be how long did it take him/her to hold a schedule like that. I understand it will likely change by the time I get there (still waiting on a class date), but it's nice to have a reference point.

5-8 years or longer. They hire 150 a month. It's going to stop at some point. Then who knows how long.

Exactly, in his case a little over 5 years. In that 5 years we’ve hired 4500 pilots, so he, we, had an incredible amount of hiring underneath us.

Past results do not guarantee future gains.

I don’t feel like making a new thread for this, but anyone know when the last opportunity to bid LAS 737 is to break a seat lock?