Regional Pilot - More on Bidding
Original March 2006 Modified October 2024
This is a continuation of the exchange on bidding.
Here we have mention, and some description of PBS bidding. I think when PBS first came in I was maybe in the middle of the seniority list, so I was building complex programs to try and get the trips I wanted. But pretty soon I was senior enough that I ignored most of the “programming” and just looked at the trips (which the company still built) and bid for the ones I wanted.
It has to be said that in the transition to PBS the union provided a ton of support. They put on training classes, and had people available in a lot in the various crew rooms to work with people on submitting their bids.
Do they ALL understand it - well clearly not, new hires rarely understand it first try around. Not many people from my class understood it. Call me cynical but as soon as I got access to the systems to see bid packets I started to try and understand it because I believed it was about to control my life and I'd better get a handle on it. But it takes many pilots a couple of rounds before they get it under control and you still run into multi-year pilots who screw up a bid for one reason or another.
But hang on - here comes Preferential Bidding - for which we have documentation but is possibly even more complex. Because in PBS the company doesn't build the lines. You get to specify what kind of line you'd like and the system tries to build it for you. But of course rarely can it meet all your wishes - so there are complex formulas for how you present your bid so that things that are less important to you get ignored first. Now THAT system, when (if) it goes live will leave a number of pilots with schedules they didn't want.
Let's take the simple case of wanting to block days off before and after your scheduled vacation. Say you want to get 3 days off before your vacation, but you'll take 2 or even just 1. The "command" to make that happen to the PBS system is non-trivial. It makes some sense to me, because at heart it's just a bizarre programming language being fed to a pretty stupid computer - and I used to live that life. But if you want to give it commands and expect some understanding from the system, now that is going to be interesting. It'll be interesting to see what happens.....