If you bid every possible trip you'd be willing to do, and then rank them based off of your desired criteria, then yes it would work. But in most categories that is incredibly labor intensive. Even worse when most trips don't report every day and many are one offs.

 

That would be incredibly useflul. I'd also like "Award highest ADC trip available" or "Award earliest release time available excluding 0000-0500"

 

If you aren't willing to comb through the bid packet and bid individual trips, then you will of course lose some precision in your bid. But, for me, the absolute worst is a trip that ends between say 0000 and 0500. So the first line of my bid is always "AVOID trips ending 0001-0500". That one line removes those trips from consideration by the WOPR. If productivity is your goal then you could do something like "Award if ADC greater than 6:15" then more lines descending to whatever cutoff you want. Like I said, you'll lose some precision but it's also much less labor intensive than going through every individual trip.

It's worth mentioning that the AVOID command can be more powerful than the AWARD simply because it removes trips completely based on certain criteria that you may have otherwise been ok with. For example if you Avoid trips ending 0001-0500 but have Award if ADC greater than 6:15, a trip that meets your Award parameter won't be seen by the WOPR if you excluded it with a previous Avoid line.

 

NYC320, 1% commutable, more 4 leg days than I’ve ever seen, short layovers…. This is worse than any regional schedule I’ve ever seen. And each pilot I’ve talked to has complained to reps but still nothing…

 

1. that sucks
2. I’ve experienced worse regional schedules

 

right, and we put a stop to those cause they were killing people…

 

FAR 117 put an end to the most onerous trips (I.e. scheduled reduced rest) at the regionals, but in many respects degraded the quality of trips at the mainlines. Flying more than 8 hours in a duty period is just one example of where mainline trips took a hit.

 

Yeah current strategy is pick out the good trips that end after midnight and sprinkle them in amongst a bunch of ADC requests.

 

Yeah a lot of production was lost internationally but overall I think allowed more production if used correctly (from the company's point of view). 10 hour overnights vs 8 or 9 don't outweigh the extra hour of unaugmented flight time we can now fly per day. 117 eliminated a lot of the huge sits at the regional and more importantly made extensions 100% optional.

 

It doesn't have to be that labor intensive. Reading this thread, I am guessing that most of you haven't learned the "Award Pairings if Pairing Number if Depart On" preference very well. This preference will allow dozens, if not hundreds, of pairings to be placed on one bid line, and you can even rank order--or not--your preferences. It can also be done fairly quickly with the Pairings search option, and you can even sort by "lowest to highest/earliest to latest/least to most"...or the other way round, in about ten different ways!

It is an unwieldy process, and not intuitive at all. The various PBS publications out there (very good most of the time) don't explain it very well either. Nevertheless it is a great feature of the WebApp. I'll add more info here if anyone is interested, dumbed down to a "pilot-friendly" level, which is the level that works for me.