e6bpilot

I figured. You don't seem the type to let a glaring issue like this happen. I just wanted to make sure any newbies reading this understood.

RJSAviator76

Resurrecting this thread for the benefit of newbies coming on line who want to maximize their paychecks.

rightseat

Best thread ever for newbies! Read it and learn. You life and bank account will be infinitely better.

Txporter

Thank you for doing so! Looking forward to putting this info into practice soon!

RabidW0mbat

This is great info, albeit still a bit overwhelming. Any advice for us newbs who will be living in base? I have a 30 minute drive to a large commuter base, how do I make that work in my favor?

Proximity

Watch open in the evening into the early hours for AM trips. AM trips go way more junior later as commuters can no longer get award the trips before their commute flights leave.

hoover

learn how to use the auto bid system and wake up when you get an award. Then you dont have to be watching the open time.

flensr

Bid premium and if you don't get a trip awarded, check open time awards report to see where the trip went to. If it's not awarded to anyone, chances are it got modified and re-posted for a later open time bid or assigned to a reserve so you may still be able to grab it. If the modified trip is assigned to a reserve out of your base, it may have a starting or ending DH leg that you can get released from and you can pick it up sometimes for more than it would have paid if you had bid on it straight. For example, an easy sub-rigged 1-day turn out of LAX paying 5 straight and 6.5 premium might end up getting assigned to a PHX reserve, with a DH leg to start and end the trip making it pay more, or even turned into a 2-day paying 11ish with the second day merely a single DH leg. You can then call scheduling to see if you can pick it up extra fly (basically grabbing it from the reserve pilot), and use commuter rules to get released from the first day DH. You can't get released from a last day DH until you actually get there and scheduling might add more to your trip, but at that point you're gonna get paid a lot more to keep going which could make it well worth your time. Sometimes tracking un-awarded turns to where they end up can be VERY lucrative since scheduling's skysolver app doesn't consider a lot of things so it'll come up with some really crazy trip mashups that end up paying more than the original trip would have paid if awarded at premium in the first place. SWA scheduling can get crazy insane doing everything they can to avoid premium awards and while it can be frustrating watching the company scramble a dozen pilot's schedules just to avoid one premium award, sometimes the resulting mess has some very high pay to block ratio trips fall out into either OT or reserve awards that may be worth hunting down and grabbing.

Also, If you don't know if the extra fly will really be a good deal, don't be afraid to ask the scheduler up front before you grab the trip what it'll pay and if/when you can get released from DH. They're usually very patient answering questions about that kind of thing because they know how silly complicated the contract rules are especially when skysolver gets involved trying to minimize trip TFP but ends up actually costing the company more.

Also, set up open time alerts to notify you about trips with DH in/out of other nearby driveable airports, if you have any near you. For example near LAX we have ONT, SNA, LGB, BUR, all mostly within an hour-ish drive or $100 uber fare from LAX. Occasionally they'll have a trip that starts or ends at one of those airports, with either a double DH to get there to start, or a double DH afterwards to get back home. If you live in the area, you may be able to get released from the DH legs and get a few more hours at home instead of DH all over the place. Make sure you set up your commute airports to anywhere you can get to within 2 hours, and very rarely the company might even call you on a day off to offer a trip that starts from one of your commute airports, without any DH on the front-end. I've had that happen I think maybe twice in 4 years, dunno if it'll still be a thing as we thrash our way through the next year's growth.

flensr

Oh FFS don't encourage the new hires to play with auto bid until they get some experience with "how things work here". Wait a year, don't be that probie who has to keep calling their chief to get out of trips they auto-bid on that they can't possibly get to. Not a good way to start.

Zard

Auto-bid is the devil.