GravyRobber

Join the club. Nearly all my P1's were awarded (4-days over the weekend), then "removed due to line constraints". Instead I got 4-days from layer 7 with locals backed up to all but 1 of them. As a senior FO, I thought I had a good handle on PBS and a good bidding strategy. As a moderately junior captain on a different airframe, I feel like I need to re-learn everything. If only we had a system that didn't require one to be a software engineer to understand...

N1234

^^^ your probably out of luck trading your entire line unless you find a reserve guy willing to take it. Go down the list in PBS and figure out who likely got a reserve line.

The more important thing will be to fix your bid going forward and see from the reason report what trips where available to you at your seniority. If there were only 4 days left then there is little you can do. If there was a good mix of trips left you need to revisit your bidding strategy and understand what limitations you put on your bid that prevented you from getting them.

MrSkywest

I put very few restrictions.
Line one was requesting standups over 6.5 hours credit.
Line 2 was standup over 6
line 3 was standups over 5
line 4 was standup over 4
Line 5 requested 1 day pairings on weekends
line 6 requested any 1 day pairings
line 7 requested any 2 day pairings

Looks like they gave me the standups but then the credit was not up to 88 hours so they took them away and put the 4 day trips in there.

Any reserve people want to trade next month?

Turbosina

But what you're not telling us is what the trip mix in your base is, nor what the senior guys in your base are bidding. At 84% you're going to get whatever nobody else wants, so there would have to be A LOT of standups and locals in your base in order for you to get any. Locals in SFO are extremely rare and go very senior, for example, and I'm assuming they go senior in ORD as well. As for standups over 6 hours credit, good luck holding those until you're in the top 15% of your base. It's just not gonna happen.

The reality is, you just have to get more senior before you can hope to exert much control over your schedule. If you need certain days off, at your seniority level it's almost better to bid reserve because at least then you are guaranteed to have certain days off.

As for trading your trips away, this is a lot easier if you:

1. Have trips that frequently return to base (ie 4 days worth of hub turns) so you can split the 4 days into multiple locals or 2-days. Those are much easier to trade or give away since nobody can pick up a 4 day, really, since everyone's already flying near max block hours.

2. Pay money. Lots of it. There's a guy in my base who's offered like $600 for a 3-day. Hard to resist that kind of cash; that's like $900 before tax. Of course, you have to have the cash to give away in the first place.

Honestly at your seniority you just gotta wait a while...

word302

You are at 84% and bidding like someone in the top 20%. You have to open up your bid to include almost everything by layer 7 at 84%. I usually make sure layer 7 includes my percentage (84 in your case), plus the percent reserve coverage in your base, plus a 10 to 15 percent buffer (as you can see were already beyond 100% of the pairings at this point). You're not bidding realistically for your seniority.

MrSkywest

In May I bid the same way and got the month of standups I requested. A large % of the trips in Chicago are standups. The "Results Report" showed that many of the standup were available when it came down to me but I guess it could not build a line of 88 hours with those remaining standup, locals, and 2 days.

I emailed guys on reserve to see if anyone was interested in trading their reserve lines for my line and immediately got 3 guys who wanted to do that. Scheduling told me that they are not allowed to swap entire lines however.

I appreciate the strategy on breaking up the lines. Any other suggestions would be welcome.

Westernflight

Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. You got what you wanted one month but not the next; people above you bid differently each month. The pairings are so dynamic in Chicago in the last year very few of my bids look similar. At 84% your bid results are going to be heavily dependent on how people senior to you bid. It's pretty much a crap shoot for you at this point. (It will get better, quickly I might add). Make sure you can GUARANTEE you'll have a line completed by layer seven. For you that means EVERY pairing in the package. If your layer 7 had 100% of the pairings you likely would have kept a lot of those standups.

word302

In a large base, especially with low seniority, basing your expectations on a previous bid is a good way to end up disappointed. I always say bid for your dreams in the first couple layers, tone it down to reality by layer 7.

rcfd13

This month was a first for me. My reason report shows hundreds of "Error: block_month violation" and I ended up with my first PN in over 4 years. I guess it couldn't complete in a higher layer with the good trips I was bidding because I'm flying too much... I'm always very careful about my bid and checking report/release times and making sure everything I'm bidding in the top layers works out. I never took into account something like a block time per month violation.

alaskadrifter

Maybe I missed it, but will SEA remain a CRJ base, or will it be all ERJ like PDX?