Originally Posted by Han Solo

Does anybody have a method to determine if a bid month will have a lot of black vs. blue days? I have a primitive method of looking at the chart in the bid package that looks at the fleet, base, and # of trips between 1-14 days. I take the total number of trips and multiply by the average trip length for a general estimate of the total work, and when I compare one month to the other I get ZERO useful information . I seriously can't figure out why two months with fairly similar flying quantity, ALV, and staffing seem to have such disparate blue/black days. I know there's a bit more vacation to account for outside of summer months but I'm totally perplexed how during the summer even bottom feeders on RES could arrange their schedules however they chose within contractual limits but now that we're in the "slow" season, 28/30 days are black and there are days with numbers like 24 required, 9 available. Appreciate if anybody could shed some light on this subject.