May '12 Bid's Award and Reason Report

Edit 4/20***

My bid solved at layer five this month. That is rather odd considering last month the bid solved at layer one. It took me a little while, but I finally realized what the issue is for the massive shift. The answer is a bit complicated, but it all comes down to the monthly change in flying.



Each month we receive a report from our domicile's SAPA RSR that gives information about the pairings. The report contains lots of charts and other information and it is extremely helpful. The guys at SAPA only started sending out those detailed reports like five or six months ago and I hope they continue. (All that information that they include is what I initially tried to put into my "Nuts and Bolts" posts, which is why I have changed up my blog's format.) The RSR reports are sent to your company email. I even advise reading the RSR report over the pairings. It sure paints a big-picture story verses looking at a trip or two that you might like.

The most drastic change in COS from April to May was the decrease in locals and increase in four-day trips. So, when you look at the change in my bid, it is easy to see that the upper percentages of flight attendants in COS want locals. When they get their locals, I get my efficient multi-day trips. Same goes for the opposite, when the locals are few and far between I get the lesser of the efficient multi-day trips.

Exert from the COS May '12 RSR report. Check out the green line verses the purple. Granted, this is just the CRJ200 but anything as drastic as that is going to make a big difference.

One thing that bit me was the stupid 32-hour overnight bug. To make an ugly pairing worse, it is a carry-in pairing. That drives me crazy. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really hate +24 hour overnights and because it is a carry-in pairing I won't have an opportunity to drop it until the 24th of May.

Ironically, I had a conversation about this scenario last week. In this case, I was awarded this junk pairing out of my layer four. As you can see, I was bidding for only minimum daily credit per duty period of 6 hours plus. This particular pairing is 21:43 credit. So, most folks scream when they see this as it is nowhere near the 24 hours they assume they are bidding for, in that layer.

In the case of extended overnights, the "day" that has no duty period is still given the minimum daily guarantee, 3:57. So the ratio between duty period and credit is actually better than 6 hours. This would be alleviated if the PBS option was simply "minimum daily credit" but, sadly, "per duty period" is added on and the only way to escape this is to remove these pairings from pairing set.

Sometimes, the pairing is built with a block inserted into the day off so as to included min daily credit, when this happens I have seen the overnight time split. For example, instead of a 32 hour overnight you'll see a 15 hour overnight, then the inserted 3:57 credit and then an additional 17 hour overnight block. When this occurs you can't bid for max overnight times in order to prevent being awarded one of these because PBS doesn't see the pairing as having a large overnight but rather two medium overnights.

Maddening isn't it? Yep.

There's nothing to see here.