Procedural/QOL questions
 

As someone interested in UAL, below are three straightforward (I hope) questions I’m hoping United pilots wouldn’t mind answering. I have 121 experience at two companies, so I’ve learned a lot about the questions I should ask that could affect QOL, or at least be annoying or pleasant relative to my current company.

I’m hoping these questions also help others looking for targeted, specific info like this.

1. Open time process. Can someone give a quick example of a trip becoming, for example, available 5 days from now—does it appear in open time immediately? If so, how does a pilot bid it? Are there certain times of day that those trips are assigned based on seniority, or is it first come first serve?
2. Premium pay. Someone on United APC recently commented “the top 10% get all the premium trips.” Can senior pilots just take every premium trip, or is there something like Delta’s premium pay system that will assign a junior person their first premium trip of each month before a senior pilot’s second premium trip?
3. Can a new hire bid a captain slot during their first year even if they haven’t finished probation or flown the minimum hours? (I know the new TA makes changes to captain bidding, I’m just asking for the first time a pilot can bid and be awarded a slot).
   Thanks in advance!

Yes, appears immediately. You just submit a pickup request or a trade request (which can be for a specific trip or criteria-based, i.e. find me a 3-day trip between day X and day Y that leaves after 10 AM with no redeyes). That can be done in Crew Companion, which is very easy to use, or directly in CCS which was written in Fortran in about 1948. For trips that depart more than a day or two in the future, those requests get processed in seniority order every 4 hours. Gets a little more complicated if the trip departs in <24 hours, which is where it could eventually become first come first served.
Yes, the senior guys can get them all.
Like you said, this is changing as we speak. Traditionally the answer was no, but under the new contract, probationary pilots have to be offered any unfilled CA slots before they can go to new hires, so I think the correct answer is that it depends on whether we still have CA vacancies in the future.​​​​​​

Just to add to 2... it really depends on your fleet/seat/base. Bidding on trips of any kind is entirely seniority driven, however, if you live in a place like NJ and are based in EWR where it is 70% commuters, there are plenty of extremely junior NB FOs getting premium pay trips simply because they live there. Premium pay is typically advertised in the real-time trade window which is simply first come-first served, but also too late for many commuters to get to the domicile. During most of the year, though, premium pay doesn't flow like a river as it does in the summer. There are very often just not that many opportunities, even for senior people. The new contract will also likely limit premium pay by increasing reserve coverage next summer when the new rules are implemented.