Originally Posted by
A320LGW
Thanks for explaining. Seems a bit odd though, why would the company pay you x1.25, for doing the exact same trip someone else was originally scheduled to do for x1?
The trip that you can pick up for overtime is an uncovered trip. So that pilot went sick, fatigued, needed a dependency day, went out of recency or maybe they swapped onto another uncovered trip leaving their original trip uncovered. Whatever happened it's now a trip that doesn't have a pilot, so the company needs to cover it.
The cheap way for them to cover it is assign a pilot on reserve or standby - that pilot doesn't get paid any overtime rate at all - but the company seems to want preserve operational resilience lately, by getting overtime volunteers first and saving the reserve pilots in case things get worse.