In theory, if there weren't any, they wouldn't run one. But there was always some "churn" in the system...people going base to base and what not for one reason or another. I can't remember a month going by without some kind of award.

NWA micromanaged the staffing, so there were always awards as they tried to balance things out. They would also try to balancing things using the temp system as well.

As to how it worked, easy peasy:

Bids were for positions effective 4 months out. The company would publish something about it around the end of the month prior, and bids closed on the 5th of the month. Awards were posted on the 20th of the month. From the date of the award, your new position was effective in 3 1/2 months.

They had to have you trained and/or in that position by that time. No random conversion dates. No guess as to when you went to training. The timeline was pretty tight from the award.

Temp bids also ran monthly. I want to say Temp bids closed on the 25th of the prior month, and your award would show up as a Temp position when bidding opened for the subsequent month (so a bid that closed on Jan 25th would be for the March flying month).

You could do a Temp bid from block to reserve (and vice versa) in your base, or block or reserve in any other base that had your equipment. The caveat was that your present position had to be one of excess, so they didn't need to replace you if you Temped somewhere else.

For the bidding month at your temp category, you bid behind everyone with a permanent position, but in seniority order with other temp holders. Positive space from home and back, and hotels/per diem for the month.

The pros of the system was predictable bidding, non-random training dates, and rapid conversion into a new category. Since there was always some churn in the system, you could almost always go base to base. If the flying in your base turned bad, or the commute turned sour, you could egress fairly rapidly without waiting for the AE gods to spin their wheel of fortune. The pref-up lists gave pretty good intel as to which way the tide was rolling, and if you didn't want to go to training over your vacation, summer, holidays, etc, you could just pull your bid for a few months, until the training window passed whatever dates you were trying to avoid. You didn't have to worry about missing a bid, because they ran every month.

The only downside I've ever heard postulated by anyone about this system vs our current system, was that if you were in the bottom of a category, you could be subjected to some amount of "flux" by getting bounced around constantly, whereas in the current system, you'd survive at the bottom of a category longer due to the longer cycles of AE/displacements. This was true about getting bounced back and forth from block to reserve, but that happens with our current system as well.

True in theory, I suppose, but I never witnessed it. In reality rather than displacing people, they'd offer up temp bids in categories of excess, and they always went pretty senior. That would soak up excess fairly quickly.

The problem with all of this is that it was tied fairly closely to the way management staffed the airline, and it took a pretty good amount of micromanaging on their part. There were some other tidbits, but that's the short version.

Nu