July '12 Bid Summary

Introduction

Welcome to the PBS Journal, my name is Ron and I'm the author of this blog, my personal bidding journal. This post and every post you see here shows how I bid and what I am awarded. Since I am a flight attendant in COS, that does make it rather unique, so take it with a grain of salt, this blog is solely intent on being educational. This particular post happens to be something of a combination of many posts. Typically, I follow a monthly format of two posts that details my bidding process (IE. pairings & bidding and follow up) but that has been more of a challenge as of late. I hope you will excuse the mess, so to speak, and still learn something. I have been doing this blog for a while (despite a couple hiatuses) so there should be something here for you to learn, especially if you are new to SkyWest's bidding.

Nuts and Bolts

July is usually the busiest month for travel and this July is no exception. We will likely set a record in July for flying. Block hours (time spent leaving gates to arriving at gates) are going to be sky high and more people are traveling by air than just about any other time of year. Usually, a month like this means a lot more flying for everyone, but in COS, it looks like we've been given a little less flying than last month. I count 367 trips total in July for COS FAs. It does make a little more sense when we see that we're down to 68 bidding flight attendants, which seems to be the lowest we've seen in a while. With 61 targeted line holders, our seven guaranteed reserves will be stretched thin! Chicago, for example, has 0 reserves in July. None! I have seen that in smaller domiciles before, but never in a hub domicile. So, if one person calls in sick, SkyWest will either have to reflow someone or deadhead an out-of-domicile crewmember. To put it simply, ain't nobody getting awarded any vacation time in July.

One terrible fact for COS is that 49.9% of all trips are on weekdays. 50.1% are on the weekends. Only 30% of weekday trips are at or above 5:15 credit. One could say that this stinks, unless you like weekend trips. The credit hours being down low actually helps the company plan for pilot block limitations. Since pilots are limitated to not exceed 30 hours of flying in seven days, the company doesn't have to worry about COS pilots nearing that limitation in most cases.

My bidding for July was more detailed than I had been in a while. I wanted to hold weekends off, but (of course) I allowed for back up plans in later layers should I be unable to hold weekends off. I also wanted to try a feature that I haven't used before "max time away from base to credit ratio". 1 - 1 time away from base to credit. These are only found in locals and are usually two leg DEN-COS locals where the credit is the same or better than the duty time. Local trips tend to be the most sought after trips by the senior flight attendants in COS, though. I would really like to be able to hold one or two of those locals in a month as it can really help make my bid solve at an earlier layer rather than adding a long two or three day trip (simply put, it just gives me more time at home in a month).

Also a feature that I used this month was cadence preference. I bid for cadence in layers 3-6. My thought was that if it was unable to give me the weekends off, I at least wanted to have trips on the same days of the week. As you'll see later, that thought backfired something fierce!

Prioritize Layers

As you can see, (and looking back on it now) I may have been too detailed in my bid. There is a saying that I used to use all the time "KISS" which means "Keep It Simple, Stupid!", I didn't follow that so much and I regret it now. That saying is underrated.

July 4th is one day that I figured most folks would want off so I utilized a strategy that has worked really well in the past for me: I bid for trips that finished early on the fourth. Usually, if you are junior enough to have to work a holiday trip it only makes sense to bid for a trip that ends early enough for you to get home and enjoy the holiday!

Line Award & Reason Report

Oh line constraints, I didn't see you there! One might imagine (if you happen to be the one person to actually read this far into the post) that I didn't anticipate this conclusion to my bid. I mean, layer 6? That's my "Oh S%#*" layer! Of course, I have become rather savy when it comes to my Oh S%#* layers (layers 6 and 7). So even as far off from my layer one as PBS came, my line is still manageable. I have 15 days off and, shockingly even, the fourth off. I may even try find a big pay day in a junior man trip.

The cadence preference seems to have been the culprit behind all of the replaced/not awarded due to line constraints. There are more replaced/not awarded pairings in my reason report than I have ever seen. It even seems to have backfired from the intent I had originally had for bidding that preference. Instead of it cadencing say, flying on Monday's, it cadenced the Thursday so all my work blocks began on Thursday. Ouch!

A big thanks to Mike on the PBS help line for clarifying that the cadence preference was indeed the culprit behind my 15 replaced/not awarded trips.

The 1-1 max TAFB to credit ratio may have worked had my cadence preference not kicked in and replaced/not awarded the trips that I could have held.

Note to self: Those darn preferences come at a price.

At 4:00pm MDT on June 19th. We had been awarded our lines but then PBS shut down for a couple hours. You simply could not log into PBS. That turned out to be a couple hour mystery. The issue went away with no changes to my line, or anyone else's that I know of.

Hopefully, you have learned something. Three years into this blog and I have a lot to learn.

Stuff to come

If you're curious, I am working on a couple of blog projects. Skedplus'n and how to bid. I don't imagine many of you need a tutorial, but maybe it will be worth something to check out and giggle over. My writting can be pretty terrible at times and I'm sure a few of you might get a good laugh at least!

Bon voyage!

***Edit 6/22/12 Correction: In June COS had 326 trips for FAs which is actually a 12% increase of flying from June to July.