July '10 Bid's Award & Reason Report

Probably the best line I have ever had.

Now, the "TT" or company business helps out a little. It is figured in as being worth 10 hours. But look at that! 113 hours and 11 days off! I typically try to fly 120 hours and so I'm one good local away from getting it. But this is honestly the best I have ever been awarded. I wasn't awarded any locals so my layer 4 and 5 was pretty much null and void but that doesn't hurt me! I didn't want locals anyway! I got two of the specific pairings I bid for in layer one and two. Life is swell.

Check out this Reason Report!

I must be doing something right because I managed to avoid the infamous, "Replaced due to line constraints." I mean, this is the ideal bid and award! I wish every month were like this.

July '10 Bid's Strategy in Bidding and Christmas Tree

Greetings July 19th,

This past week I received my tax return. Having bought a house and being the head of household we got quite a bit back. So, like anyone else interested in helping the economy, I bought an iPad. This past week I had a four-day trip and so I brought along my iPad. It works great! I did all of my bidding on it. But I waited to get home to my Mac book before I did my posts because I haven't been able to do the cropped screen shots from my iPad.

So July's bid was one that I changed my strategy on. Like every month, your bid should take into account the monthly and seasonal changes. Looking at the Nuts and Bolts for July it was easy to see that I'd need to add locals into my bid. There were just so many of them and in order for me to be awarded a legal line without falling to my seventh layer (or worse) I would need to change the way I typically bid.

As you can see, I am not bidding to my seniority ratio. Generally that is an excellent rule of thumb but I do not because I typically bid for multi-day trips and the large majority of FA's senior to me bid for locals. It was still risky bidding for 49% in my seventh layer, but I was confident that with July being such a bountiful month I wouldn't have any problem.

I have continued to use my Standing Bid and a starting point for my bidding. My Standing Bid only contains my line properties which is what I have overlooked in the past. It wasn't pretty. I also made a slight modification to my layer three. When I was looking at the View Pairing Set for layer three, I noticed a couple of trips I didn't want to fly... at least in that layer. So the easiest way to remove them from that layer was bidding to avoid YXE.

Well, the bids are out! Time to see if my strategy worked!

July '10 Bid's Nuts and Bolts

An increase in flying? Yes! Finally! But wait, there's more! COS is down to having only four reserves for July. So few of us will see less than 90 hours for July. It is crucial we all get this bid right because this situation has possibility to award lots of CN's (July 4th) and PN's. Also, it seems that the majority of the trips are averaging around 5 credit hours per duty period and under. Not exactly great in my opinion. I'd much rather have quality over quantity, but I am very happy that there will be much fewer reserve lines and some of our "cusp" flight attendants won't have to rely on their cell phones.

And sorry for my late Nut and Bolts post. I've taken some much needed vacation time and I've been rather busy with my family. It's been nice but it is time to get some work done, right? Okay! Let's get started.

So 52 Guaranteed  lines, 56 targeted lines, and 4 reserves. Compared to last months 48 Guaranteed, 52 targeted, 11 reserves and a "C" package. As I said, for July we have an increase in flying. An increase just shy of one hundred pairings. It will be he most flying Colorado Springs has seen this year. In fact, it is more flying that we even had in December (474 pairings) and it is the most I have seen since I began this journal back in October.

In July we have 488 total pairings. That includes FA and FF.

186 of those are on the CRJ 200.
302 of those are on the CRJ 700.

Trip lengths for July include
264 Locals
123 Two-day trips
20 Three-day trips
81 Four-day trips

Compare that to:


398 total pairings in June


136 were on the CRJ200
262 were on the CRJ700


Pairing lengths for June include:


191 locals
82 Two-day trips
28 Three-day trips
97 Four-day trips