Originally Posted by LeineLodge

First determine what your priority is. Do you want to avoid commuting to RSV at all costs? Are you willing to take a potential pay hit to do so?

Be VERY careful with the RLL in a brand new category with not much flying. You correctly identified one of the risks: you might not be able to pick anything (much) up.

RLL basically just waives your REG line guarantee (65:00 hours) and says you're willing to accept any regular line, including all the way down to 0 hours. It's then up to you, if you want/can, to pick up flying from Open Time. Your guarantee as a RES pilot is 72 hours for December, so keep that in mind as well.

To my knowledge you can't bid a Blank Line. I don't even know if we have that in the contract anymore - I seem to remember it was done away when Shadow bidding happened. So your options are:

1. Start Pairings (Try for a REGular line)

OR

2. Start Reserve (Get a REServe line)

You can separate these into different bid groups if you want to get fancy, and add a bunch of Else Start Next's to layer your bid BUT if it were me, I would just keep it simple.

To get you finished with your bid (and back to the books) quickly, I would probably do something like this:

1. Start Parings
2. Prefer OFF (list the dates from highest priority to lowest - same line is fine)
3. Award (Whatever you want - the bidpack is small so you could pick specific rotation numbers if you want or you could even skip this line)
Award Parings (This is a system generated bid line that is always there)

4. Start Reserve
5. Prefer OFF (again list your dates highest priority to lowest on the same line - I'd list your top 20 dates here in case you can't hold a few of them off)

This is a simple, safe bid that will give you a line if it can (probably not gonna happen with so little flying, but who knows.) If you can't hold a line it will give you a RES line prioritizing the dates OFF that you selected. I would not use the RLL option if it were me, as it puts you at risk of losing out on a lot of $, with no ability to pick up.

You can also have your newhire mentor and/or the PBS committee look over your bid when you get it put together. Never hurts to have a second pair of eyes on it, especially at first.