Top third? You need to be top 15% or your not much beter on bidding/trading unless you put lots of time into it.
Can you explain how the trip drop thing works? I can see being able to drop a trip back to the company for no pay, and only if the trip is below what the reserve pilot would be paid for sitting, and only if they have enough reserve pilots. Thats one problem here, usually to few reserve pilots, although, not lately.
Here it's not a factor of how much the trip is worth, rather, simply if they have reserve coverage above the "floor" on that particular day / series of days.
The reserve floor is a pre-determined percentage of how many people they need on reserve on any given day, which changes on weekends and holidays and by time of year (heavy summer months require more reserves for example).
Then they take the number of open trips on that day (or that fall into that day, for instance a 3-day started on a Tuesday but is still factored into Wednesday and Thursday's coverage because you have to have a person for each duty period).
If there are more people available than the coverage "floor" plus uncovered trips in open time, then you have flexibility to simply give your trip back to the company, down to 30 hours per month. If not, then your drop is denied.
Non-vertical trip trades are trading a trip you have with a trip the company has uncovered that aren't on the exact same day(s) you're trying to get rid of. Vertical trades are always granted, as long as it's the same base, because it doesn't change the coverage. Non-vertical trades do the coverage check and, if any ONE day doesn't have coverage and the trip you're trading OUT of falls on one of those days, your trade is denied.
Otherwise, adequate coverage gets your request granted, regardless of what it does to your credit, up or down, except you can't go below the 30 hours min per month. In SAP - your version of ELITT - you can't go below 70 hours which sucks right now because many lines are already right at 70 hours so you can't SAP unless you add time first.
The system works fairly well for flexibility, although it basically puts all the flying onto reserves for weekend trips and red-eyes. Few people want those, so they always end up in open time, unless there's nothing to pick up in its place for those guys who get those lines like November - very little movement in open time because there's only a handful of trips available to trade into and people don't want to go low credit.
As for your thought of giving back more than what a reserve guy credits daily on a guarantee rate broken down, the company really doesn't care because they know most of us are trying to pick up MORE credit over the same days, so the high-value trips go to line holders, leaving low-credit and uncommutable stuff for the reserves.
As a matter of fact, they'd prefer to pre-assign the high-credit stuff to reserves, knowing they won't break guarantee in most cases, but we got rid of that in the last contract, making them leave open time available all month until 72 hours prior to the trip, anything inside that is marked premium or MUST be assigned to a reserve, and we have two pilots who have full scheduling software access to see what's going on with trips. Half the time a reserve knows what they're doing if it came from open time about 3 days in advance. The rest of their flying is last-minute sick calls.
We also have a trade board where we can trade amongst ourselves, but it's not used much because most people aren't legal to pick up a full trip without getting rid of theirs first.
All in all I like the system, and would prefer a hybrid: what we have with the ability to break the trip up into pieces like you do in case a pilot wants part or all of it.
