Originally Posted by
TonyC
There have always been excess bids when airplanes were being retired. The DC-10 was no different.
The big difference, and the Excess Bid to which I am referring here, is when an Excess Bid was held to allow over-60, under-65 Second Officers to leave those seats for any seat their seniority would hold. That bid contained -1 Excesses in most of the other seats so that every DC-10 engineer that went to the left seat of a wide-body kicked the most junior Captain out of that same seat. That Excess bid came after the age change.
It was a management decision.
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I understand the need for excess bids and their process. I was specifically asking for the timeline. I thought the bid was posted, then the age change went into effect. The bid was subsequently cancelled and then reposted. After it closed, then we had the DC-10 excess bid. The thing that most don't realize was, since the bid reopened and had vacancies, there were some senior DC-10 f/e's (way senior to me) that could only hold nb f/o on the vacancy bid and they wanted to guarantee a window seat. Yes, some held the left seat of some a/c and some held the right seat of some. Since they bid out on the vacancy bid, once the excess bid came out, the individuals that had bid out(even if they hadn't gone to training yet) we not part of the excess, so didn't get to go directly to whatever they could hold. Believe it or not, this actually was better than if they only had the excess, where they all could have gone directly to the WB capt seat or the highest seat possible. I am not justifying the actions of some or their reasons for doing so but sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.