Ignition Overide....
You are correct in your comments about the staffing problems during the summer of love......
We have (had) kind of a funny pay situation here up till the furloughs.....
You were paid a guarantee of 75 hours, Reserve or lineholder.
You could fly, in any one month, up to 83 Hard Hours domestic, and 85 Hard Hours domestic. This was waived for carry in's, that portion of a trip that starts near then end of the month and carries into the new month.
(For those who don't know, Hard Hours are what you actually fly, Soft hours are pay that you are given for extensive layovers, where you are forced to stay at a hotel or field layovers. When I was on the 737, some days scedules us only one leg, but we were guaranteed 5 hours credit time. )
Now, credit time was virtually unlimited. If you were like me, fairly senior on the 767, you could either pick up overtime to 85 hours or bid months with carryings that would brink you up to 90 hours hard time. The Soft time in thes months would be well over a 100 hours credit. I had many months like that.
Now the strange part, we are only paid 85 hours a month maxium. Any credit time over that is put into a bank, and later either trip dropped or, in the month of November, cashed completely out.
What happend in the Summer of love, there was peer group pressure not to fly over your line. Most people did not. If you did, your monthly schedule was posted on the walls, along with some disparaging remarks about your lineage...
As an example, in the early 1990's, UAL pilots got to option to trip trade. A union study concluded that trip trading would cost 150 wide body captain jobs, and 300 narrow body captain jobs.
When people ceased flying over what the line builders scheduled, UAL was short 450 pilots.
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Down in 3 Green, UAL had former Eastern Pilots in the interview process.....If your name was not in the yellow sheet, you can bet you recieved preferential hiring....we picked up a lot of good Eastern Men, good pilots and good people. On the 727, it was not unusual for me to have both a former Eastern pilot in both the right seat and on the panel. United ALPA went out of its way to help the Eastern guys........if they didn't perform work as a permanent replacement.