crewdawg

Both trips in the same add line

Rooster435

Both on same line.

HelloNewnan

Agreed. This sounds more like a political hit piece that the old guard would try to lay down prior to an election. The truth is these days the MEC Chair has no real power, and the MEC has to approve everything. Whatever settlements happed don't happen in a vacuum. That means there is participation by contract administration and the primary committee, buy-in from the other committees and after all that it has to be approved by the MEC.

RightSide

Thank you very much.

iLikeMoose

Newbie question: I hear a lot of people talk up the first PCS run, but what is the significance of it? There really isn’t much open time or stuff on the swap board for my category (if I’m looking at it right) so it doesn’t seem like there’s much I could even try to do if I wanted to. I guess it may be different in other bases, or am I missing something important about this event?

myrkridia

Every month is different. Drops of any sort, swaps, etc for next month all have to wait for that first run. Any ninja attempting to drop their schedule for the following month might stand the best chance in those first few runs. Also, just because it's not on open time now, doesn't mean it can't be after the first run.


​​​​​​Edit: I also forgot to mention that the reserve coverage is almost always better before the first run. So again that allows for more changes to your schedule.

Buck Rogers

Also, it's analogous to vacancy bids. Just because what you want on a vacancy bid is not published, doesn't mean you won't get it because it may open up on the bid run.

Assume someone senior to you drops that primo trip that is exactly what you want. If you have submitted a PU/SWAP for that specific rotation(not posted) you may get it. If you don't have the PU/SWAP slip in, there is no way you will get it. Additionally, you can put in a *4/15NOV if you will take any four day trip on 15 Nov. These are known as blind swap with the pot. Sometimes you can get some really cool trips that are "blind" . I once got a military charter to Sofia Bulgaria and the Middle East. 6 day trip with international DH front and back end. With a *6 blind swap/PU I got it. Scheduling may have dropped it into the pot 3 minutes prior to a PCS run hence nobody really even had time to see it. With the blind slip in, I got the slot machine to ring up three 7's. Of course, it could always give you a pile of "Crap, who knew they could build a trip that bad"

9 times out of 10(or more) I was extremely happy with my blind swaps/pick-ups.

iLikeMoose

Hmm, clearly I am out of my element, I hadn’t thought about putting in a swap request for stuff that isn’t on the trade board currently. I assume if something gets put into open time that would be compatible with your blind request, it will process your swap on the same run? Or will it dump a bunch of stuff into open time and then process swaps with the newly available stuff in the next run?

Thank you for the write-up!

Buck Rogers

Same run....it's magical

I flew with a bottom feeder line holder that had the most primo trips. He culled all the trips he wanted to fly and loaded more than 300 swap with the pot trading his initial crap for really senior trips. He said he spent about an hour inputting it while watching his kids watch a movie. His logic was 1 hour of "pain" to input for a month of superb trips.

MJP27

Buck...Tread lightly. You're going away too many trade secrets..lol

This is exactly how I managed my schedule on the 88 as a junior CA. Got at least half my weekends off and invariably upgraded my PBS awarded trips across the board. It made being junior bearable. The 19th - 21st were very busy days of the month for me, but worth every second of the time invested.