The PBS video is great, and I highly recommend everyone wondering about this go to the DALPA website to watch it, or at least the parts that interest you. Here are a couple of important notes. This is all about the "Award Pairings if Pairing Number if Departing On (with the ordered option).

At 21:30 begins a great discussion about the Pairings tab. At about the 30 minute point is a good discussion of the Pairings Search option and how you can manipulate it.

At the 38 minute point is a more in depth discussion of how to take the Pairings Search results and turn them into a bid preference.

At the 39:30 point is an excellent demo of how to rank order these. If you don't specifically choose to rank order your trips, then PBS assumes that all trips on the same line are equally important to you--and to some pilots that may be just fine. But to most of us, we want to rank order them from best to least. The video covers everything you need to know plus more.

ERROR MESSAGES

Now here are two common error messages you may receive, and they are confusing, but once you understand what they are saying they are easily fixed. I've experienced both of these messages numerous times! (Disclaimer, I am not sure if the video explains these, as I didn't watch the entire thing; if it does then someone enlighten me with the time stamp and I'll edit this).

1. Before you can actually submit your pairings search as a bid preference, you must have first selected a bid line (any line will do, but preferably where you want the bid preference to go) on the Bids tab. All you have to do is single-click a bid line, and it will turn blue. If you don't do that first--and it is quite easy to forget, especially if you just logged in and immediately do a pairings search--you will get the following popup message:

dalpbs.navblue.aero says

Award Pairings Bid Preference is not compatible with the selected bid type. Please adjust your selection and try again.

All that means is that you forget to first select a bid line before you attempted to add a pairings search result as a bid preference. That is all that means. Pretty computer-geek confusing eh? A better message would be "please ensure that you have a bid line highlighted prior to submitting your pairings search as a bid line" or something. So...make sure that you have done that.

2. The second error message you frequently get is when you have selected some, or perhaps even all, the pairings in a pairings search, then have individually clicked on trips on some lines (the green circles) but not clicked on specific trips on other lines. You will get the following error message:

dalpbs.navblue.aero says

New bid is being added with the 'Pairing Number Depart On' and 'Pairing Number' conditions, which may not match any Pairing. Do you still want to add the bid?

All that means is:

- you have selected at least two separate pairing numbers by checking the check box next to the pairing number on the left side of the screen
- at least one of these lines does have the individual rotation circle selected, shown by the circle turning green
- at least one of these lines does not have the individual circle selected

If this is the case, then the two lines (or more) are incompatible as bid preferences on the same line. The first (with the green circle) is "Award Pairings if Pairing Number if Departing On" and the second (no circle selected) is "Award Pairings if Pairing Number"--"Departing On" is not an option.

Solution? Just make the lines all harmonious. Either select/click at least one "green circle" on each and every line with a selected pairing, or don't have any selected on each and every selected pairing.

I find that this frequently happens in the following case. I will often do a pairings search to see what's available. I will often then "select all" to take a good look and perhaps even print out some trips. Then I forget that I have "selected all" then I will click the green circle, only to get the error message. Essentially the error message is saying "hey bud, you've selected all these individual pairings by specific date, but you still left some other pairings selected on the left with no further action. Did you really mean that?"

Enough! I know I tend to ramble. Hopefully this is useful to some. Play around with your default bids if you want to see some of this in action, and how it all works. Just don't forget to delete any hypothetical default bids you might have created in the process!