While on reserve at AirTran, are pilots allowed to do some kind of aggressive pickup? Like you're on for 4 days and there is a 4 day trip available. Can you bid to pick it up?
No.
Although if you make nice with the schedulers, sometimes you can "suggest" a certain trip that would fit your schedule nicely. The trick with that is to call up the night before around 7. If they're busy, call back about 11 p.m. That's when they start filling the next day's open time.
Lately there hasn't been much, the lineholders and buildup guys are shuffling their trips around, and the only thing reserves are flying is last-minute sick calls and such.
For instance, until last night, there weren't ANY trips in 717 FO open time for the entire next week (except weekend spillover trips). Now there's 3, all uncommutable with 7:00 a.m. shows. My 2-day I dropped on Monday that was commutable was snatched up in 7 minutes flat.
FLICA has a setting where you can ask it to email you with any trips that pop up meeting certain criteria. I then get online and, if I like the trip, I'll pick something up. That means the only things that get left in there are CDO's and last-minute stuff.
That will change as the summer schedule starts picking up in May.
And... can you trade you're days around on Reserve as long as you end up with the same amount of days on reserve?
Sometimes. Depends on a couple things. Their needs and staffing (can't trade out of a weekend very easily), and how high credit you are.
If you want, and the coverage allows it, you can drop reserve days completely. I did this every month on reserve, dropping to 14-15 days off, simply because I can't handle 10 or 11 days off a month for more than a month or two, too much work and not enough time home. Would be different if I lived in domicile and could sit reserve from home.
When I did this, I'd still credit 80-85 hours because of the very cool reserve pay system here that will probably be going away with the next contract according to the scuttlebut I'm hearing.
One of the things I was successful in doing "sometimes", is dropping an entire week of reserve then, the night before if there are a bunch of trips in open time, calling them up and asking if they need you. A lot of times they'll be glad for the extra coverage if they're very short on people, but you're still considered a reserve pilot and can be reassigned in the middle, at the end, whatever, because you're on reserve for that month. Sucks, but had that happen once, too.
Downside if you do that, and they don't have a need for you, you just lost a couple days of reserve pay. Sucks if you don't have another job at home to make up for it (which is one of the reasons I could afford the risk).
Worse, sometimes, they can URP you, meaning remove reserve periods with NO pay if you're really high credit. That sucks, only had them do that once in 8 months of reserve, but they can.
Your best bet is to do swaps/drops EARLY IN THE MONTH, like the 1st day Scheduling has control of the monthly schedule after Planning is done with it. If you don't do it early, lineholders and buildup line holders will drop and trade out of the weekends and holidays making them "low coverage" and impossible to do anything with later.
No problem. Enjoy!
