Joining BA as a junior pilot, you will find yourself in blind line territory, so you can put in preferences for the trips that you want, however on saying that last month I noticed a hell of a lot of junior guys on trip lines.
Funnily enough the reason for that has come up in debate elsewhere about the short haul life style, and might be worth knowing.
Blindline=company writes your complete roster - their job to get you to CAP.
At the moment under the current rule set the company is quite constrained on how it "builds" the lines - result is lots of blindlines end up under CAP, possibly bulked out with a day/days Time Assignability ( sort of home stand-by), nevertheless a Blindline holder is "pay protected", i.e. always paid as if they had worked to CAP.
Tripline= Trip line holder tries to build their own roster. Their own job to make CAP - don't make it they may lose pay in certain circumstances,
You may have sacrifice days off to avoid losing cash, or these days increasingly risk having extra work that gets dropped on the line during the Roster Assign process....
It seems to be becoming increasingly common to see the very junior guys working like the clappers on carp triplines whilst the guys just above them are picking up blindlines in order to try to get some time off - which works well if you don't mind a few days uncertainty over any Time Assignable days.
However...I'll also add the heads up that some of the constraints on the company regarding blindline build are being removed later this year, more controls may well come off in a couple of years under Bidline 2017, so blindlines are going to be more efficient, which certainly won't mean working less...
