Top of bid package, in the general info stuff along with ALV, x days, etc.

 

Wait, can someone explain to me like I’m a 3rd grader? I had no idea about this. I thought you just had to give them 4 day blocks of reserve as a minimum. This is what I am getting so far:

- You can only have two blocks of X days on the 350? So if there are 14 X days available in the month you have to split them in 2 groups?

- It also sounds like you have to give them a 9 day block of reserve days?

So you can’t go “8 on 7 off“ then “8 on 7 off” again?

 

You can bid for reserve blocks shorter than MSL. However, if you do get a block of reserve greater than MSL, you can't do PCS moves to make a block less than MSL.


The 350 reserve rules are 4-99-2. Disregard the 99, it's useless. So aside from the standard beginning or end of the month or CQ (or other "work" day) caveats, you must have a minimum of 4 days on call. The two means you can only have two off day blocks. What does that mean....essentially you have the followed three options for bidding reserve on the 350.

1. One big block of all your on call days.
2. Two blocks of on call days, but one block MUST touch either the first day of the bid month or the last day of the bid month.
3. Three blocks of on call days but now one block MUST touch the first day of the bid month, and another MUST touch the last day of the bid month.

Like I mentioned above, during PBS line construction, you can be awarded a block of fewer than nine days. However, if you get a block of days larger than nine, you can't do a PCS X-day move that would drop that block below nine days.

PWA 12.M.8.d.2.exception and 12.M.8.e.2.exception.

NOTE: MSL currently only impacts the 350.

 

You currently can't break a string 9 days or longer into a segment(s) shorter than 6 days. The 6 comes from the average rotation length for the month, and the 9 is contractual for any bid pack with more than 20% of rotations 9 days or longer. Restricts pd, apd, moving x days, etc. You also have to adhere to the maximum of 2 X day blocks.

At the moment, the 350 is the only category affected by MSL. Folks can still play stay-home games on reserve in other categories, but the 350 is definitely harder.

 

Are you sure about the 6 days? Unless the note applies, it appears to me that you can't go below 9 days (published MSL) with an X-day move.

 

Correct. On the A350, you cannot modify your awarded reserve schedule to take a string of 9+ days of reserve and make it less than 9. Oddly, that's why they call it "Minimum Separation Length." 😁

 

I don't have the reference handy. I'm pretty sure 9 was the trigger length, but the smallest chunk you could chop down to was the average rotation length. So, if the average was 6.3 days, you could theoretically move an X day into the middle of a string of 15 to create two 7 day blocks. But other rules (max x day groupings) could be the stopper against that. I think you can PD two days off the end of a 9-day string in this example though... could be wrong!

 

Yeah....it is confusing but for the A350 the MSL is 9 days, and, for MSL purposes, it cannot be less than 9 days.

First off, the Bid Package PWA references are wrong which adds yet more confusion but if you look at 12.A.13 which defines "MSL," you need to average all of the published rotations scheduled to operate 9 or more days (which means you throw out all the AMS, PEK and PVG trips because they are less than 9 days) and therefore you are counting the number of 9 (and maybe 10 or 11) day trips to get that weighted average which cannot, by it's definition, be below 9 days.

Then you look at 12.M.8.d (exception one to subsection 2 of exception two....I kid you not on that buried reference) 🙄 and it tells you that you cannot move an X day if such move would reduce the the length of your contiguous block of on-call days to a length less than the MSL (9 days per the bid package).

 

Looks like a bunch of 350Bs got 4 x day groupings on the January wide report. Maybe the company doesn’t even understand this. I guess bid what you want and see what happens.

 

All of the awards I can see conform to the 4-99-2 reserve rules. You can have a 4-day block as long as you don’t have more than 2 blocks of X-days, and none of them do.