Holy crap, what a load of rubbish.
The trip trade system glitched for a few hours. Our trips in the TTS show as either red or green. Green means you can dump the trip into open time or dump it and get paid out of vacation time. Red means no drops, “you will get nothing and like it”.
The east coast and Midwest domiciles were able to take advantage if they were fortunate enough to be online to catch the mistake. West coasters and PHX never saw the windfall because someone woke up from their nap and pushed the button to turn off the system.
The result of this is that some people dumped their schedule into open time. Christmas and New Year’s Eve just received some more open trips available. What the company has done has been to announce the fleets and bases that have the most uncovered trips will see 150% pay to cover those trips. That incentive, plus the huge amount of reserves in the second half of the month will ensure that the trips get flown. Crew tracking and scheduling will be in a frenzy but in the end I expect no flights to cancel.
It’s funny, I saw my calendar that day and the green trips and I didn’t bother to drop any. I’m flying back home Christmas Day and I liked my schedule already.