Regional Pilot - Bidding
Original: March 2006 Updated: September 2024
This is not very clear but it was probably part of an exchange about bidding.
When I initially joined the airline, bidding was done through paper packets (you may have been able to read it online, I don’t recall). The company created a series of monthly lines, including lines that were reserve lines and showed you which days off you’d have if you were awarded this line.
You submitted your bid for which line you’d like to fly, in order of your priority. Then the company would go through each pilot by seniority and award them the first available line of their submitted priorities. So if you were seniority 1 in base and seat you just need to submit one bid line, you’re going to get it, seniority 2, just 2 lines. So you can imagine what seniority 38 has to do. I’m not sure what the process was if you didn’t bid, I think they just left you to the end and awarded you something that was left, since the punishment for non-bidding was a reserve line.
Later on we went to PBS bidding, which is a whole different thing, and I’m sure I’ll write something about that in the future.
The strangest thing about it is that they give you NO training on the process at all - they just throw you out there and expect you to figure it out. Which, as you can tell, is no easy feat. Even the reports and bid packets are full of weird acronyms that mostly you guess at what they mean! I've been looking at bid packets for 6 months and bidding for about 3, yet last week the captain I was flying with was talking about how he bids and I finally realized what the point of about 3 pages of crap in the middle of the lines report was about - it gives you the first day report time and last day release time - which if you want to commute and fly in the first day and leave the last day is important - until then I couldn't figure out why the paper was being wasted...... As you say - the ability to control your bid can make a big difference to your QOL - so you figure it out. It's as if Greece were to invade the United States and win - I've tried learning Greek before, and if you'll excuse the pun, it was all Greek to me. But I'm sure if I had to I'd learn it pretty quick....