Didn't sailingfun insist that the previous bid was the last of the displacements? How's that working out?

The ER just started going junior again last bid. So much for those guys.

This bid wreaks of being a stop gap for a mess up in staffing.

Junior, or senior, I don't know if it matters on the ER in NYC. I flew with a fairly junior guy who said he can work it so most months he doesn't have to sit short call a single day. He showed me the coverage list for the month and every day was blue (over) with most having 20-30 people over what was required.

I bet the computer that runs the AE will meltdown from the multiple percentages those guys put in for each category. :D

Seems to me that they're trying to get some of the more senior ER guys to get off their lazy butts and bid small narrow body capt. There may be some super premium WB FOz that will do that too (but I doubt very many) which will leave some openings for more ER movement.

Don't know..................I've been wrong the last 2.

Ferd

I fly with plenty of mid seniority FO's who are ready for a move up. They can only hold ACC, DKR and the ocasional Europe via a white slip. Soma guys were displaced off the 88 in NYC and would probably go back.

I'm with you, don't think many of the WB FOs will leave, all I see are those guys coming back from NB cpt, and they don't want to go back.

I bet at least 50% of the ER displacements are offset by AE's and people bidding off of it. We will see soon enough.

I'm surprised no one is commenting on the fact that Mar is now the "high time" month. This is very telling re the Jul/Aug former high-time months being chopped by one day. If you look at the latest Crew Resources newsletter, the graph on monthly block hours, you'll see that Mar domestic is about 240k and was that last year too, and Jul/Aug was 255k last year. So... the big summer "bump" in flying, about 15k block hours during Jul/Aug from the next highest month of Mar, is projected to be GONE. Jun is usually actually a wee bit higher than Mar also.
What's it mean? It means the prior limiting factor for all our history of when we had to hire, the Jul/Aug bump, has now dissappeared and here's the proof. It means the 31-day to 30 day shift in bid periods that got dealt off the bottom of the deck while no one was really looking (or at least no one at the Union was really TALKING ABOUT or analyzing responsibly for us) have reset the need for hiring approx 7% lower from a block hour driver perspective.
7% * 11,000 pilots approx = 770 pilots no longer needed to be carried to cover the summer bump. IMO, it means (no matter WHAT we end up doing with hiring or how tight we are in some cats right now) a 770ish pilot DELAY in when they WOULD HAVE had to hire without this single change.

Before the usual suspects jump on this and mischaracterize it, this is not a total-bid or total-system analysis... just an observation about the input one single change made to the FINAL totals in the last TA, with the only pertinent message being "Pay attention to the details even if ALPA doesn't provide an analysis for us, because these small one-liner changes are HUGE in their impact!"

As others have said, and Jack Bauer did a great Occam's Razor application up above, I'm surprised that this fix-up bid didn't include 73N or 717 slots. This may be an indicator that excess pilots have mostly dried up (despite the creation of excess I often post about from various manning tweaks last TA). I say this because when there is excess manning, it is usually handled by shifting it downwards to the minimum paying positions, where they can sit unused at the lowest pay. We've seen this several times over the last few years.

In this AE, there was no downward shift to a "parking orbit", instead there was an emergency no-notice immediate transition shift into shorted categories. I would have thought that, if there was really excess manning in the 7erB, it would get parked into the 717 we know is coming and was understaffed on the last bid... instead, it looks like the driver is a need in the other cats, and the bill was just paid from the minimum-pain category which turns out to be 7erB.

Oh crap, they got my hopes for hiring up again... will I never learn?

Totally agree el Ferdmeister...

Those A seats are going to be bid, not displaced to...Not everybody has been on their lazy butts as long as you and me. They might have been flying Int'l just long enough to have forgotten what an -88 schedule looks like, but not so long that they forgot how to do all the stuff you have to do on a leg between ATL and HSV in 17 minutes flying 260 degrees.:D