Summary of line awards February 27th, 2010

I tent to over analyze things, my bidding is no different. With as much as I fly it has become a necessary habit. I can either perfect my bid or I can gripe about it. While griping is easy and a way of cooping, working to better your bid is nothing less than a science. Colorado Springs is even more of a quagmire where the flying changes violently from month to month. Throw seniority, transfers, FMLA, and OJIs into the mix and you've got an environment that would make any scientist scratch their head. Below are my awards for the past 10 months. No doubt, the monthly changes drastically effects each award. No month is the same and consistency is something of a oxymoron even for those that are senior.

Something that has always made me scratch my head is the "Published" times, or when the lines come out. As you can see there isn't any visible rhyme or reason for when they are published. Now, the publish time is different for each domicile but in the last ten months they've all been published between 2:00pm on the 18th and 11:00am on the 19th. It is common theory that the longer it takes to publish, the worse of a schedule you'll have (or the more scheduling can have their way with you). although there is insufficient evidence to support that argument, my March versus February awards seems to support it.

March:

February:

January:

December:

November:

September:

October:

August:

July:

June:

May:

Thursday Hodgepodge February 18, 2010

1. Option B passed the first round! Tonight in a landslide 869 - 461 vote option A was destroyed. No pay cuts! That is certainly good news. Now, Option B must pass a yes or no vote. I am inclined to vote 'yes' just to get this over with, but I'm tempted to vote 'no' to have SIA go back to the drawing board and actually represent my interest for a change. Health care is one of my major concerns besides pay and quality of life. I would really like to see an HMO survive the removal of all our healthcare options. We'll see. For now we can celebrate the fact that we won't receive a pay cut.
2. COS-IAD Starting June 9th. Operated by SkyWest airlines!!! Lots of rumors still floating. It looks like we will open a crew domicile in MSP. And there is a possibility of an Airtran '900 domicile in MCO!

March '10 Bid's Award & Reason Report

Not too shabby! I am glad to see it turned out this way. The only thing that bugs me is the "replaced by lower layer because of line constraints." In this case it worked out well for me. But, it means that I still don't have complete control of how I bid. I wonder if I ever will.

March '10 Bid's Strategy in Bidding and The Christmas Tree

In March the flying changed quite a bit. Although we had roughly the same number of lines, the block average fell. Three day trips were almost gone with the exception of the new MSP flying. My strategy had to change. I couldn't just bid three day trips and end up with a good line. I first saw that the best TAFB vs credit ratio laid with the two-day trips. Now, I have come to learn that in COS the upper 10% FA's like to fly locals while majority of the 10 - 30% like high paying two and three day trips. This left me with bidding four day trips, which I did in my first layer.

I called up the PBS help line a couple times with just some random questions. I had one guy explain to me that I didn't need to bid "Min days off" because the computer defaults at 15 and there is no way to get around that default currently. Now it is important to know that option B passed the first round of voting tonight. If it passes the second round I'll hopefully be awarded more hours.

March '10 Bid's Nuts and Bolts

So for March the out look is a little less bleak than the previous months thanks in large part to our new MSP flying, which there is a ton of.

This month I am still number 36 in the bid package although we lost a few FA's to DEN so this month I am bidding 56.3% when in February I was 55.4%. It isn't exactly moving up, but at least no one has transferred into COS from ATL which is closing March 1.

Nuts and Bolts:

 For March we have 368 total trips.

138 are on the CRJ200
230 are on the CRJ700

Pairing lengths for March include,

163 Locals
60 Two-day trips
63 Three-day trips (are are crap compared to last month)
82 Four-day trips

In February we had 352 total trips. 


142 are on the CRJ200
210 of those are on the CRJ700


Pairing lengths for February include,


107 Locals
67 Two-day trips
61 Three-day trips
115 Four-day trips
2 Five-day trips

February '10 Bid's Award & Reason Report