In December, excluding DC9 and 755, 30.42% of the airline is on reserve.

And thats your fun fact-ish of the day.

Today's a great day for football!!! That is all!

HOOK'EM!!!

I flight would not be designated payload optimized until they start the load planning process a few hours before the flight. Just because a flight is load optimized does not mean she wont get on. It just means they want the agent to hold off boarding the non revs until they get the final cargo weights. In most cases when payload optimized we still get all the non revs on the aircraft. If you posted where in SA she is coming from we could give you a better idea. Some have lots of cargo like Lima. I have never had a issue out of Sao Paulo or Rio.

They run several practice bids after posting every time. I suspect in this case they will run at least half a dozen. They just don't post the results. Years ago you could call them or walk over and see a practice bid. They stopped that because they found that in the last day before a bid closed over 30 percent of the pilots changed what they wanted. People who thought they were getting a bid and then did not get it would complain even though they were told it was not the final bid. It created to many headaches for them. You can however be sure they will run many bids before they make a final posting.
They want to move as many pilots as possible because now is the perfect time. They have a surplus of pilots so can keep a bunch in school and fly the schedule. The cost to do this is minimal. The majority of training costs are fixed. The portion of training costs that can flux is much cheaper when you have a surplus of pilots. If you are doing a lot of training and short then those costs go way up as the number of Greenslips explodes. It was not unusual in a heavy training time to have 5000 plus green slips a month when we had 7000 pilots.
They anticipate next winter that they will be hiring pilots. That creates lots of training events. If they are going to move people now is by far the most logical time to do it. The good news is that this bid is going to be a gain in positions. We have not seen that in a long time!!

They can and that is part of the fun of surplus bids.

Interesting sailing. You kind of figure they're watching it, but I've got two quesitons, a) can they renege on their offering or what they posted if they don't like what they're seeing or do they have to cancel the bid and start over (i.e. drop NYC 765 as an example) and b) what exactly is "a gain in positions" though?

And Super, Alabama or Florida, which one do you want?

I thought easybid was supposed to be free. Why is it prompting me for my credit card and charge me per minute?? :confused:

Nope, it would just show guys where they screwed up. Plus, they would change what is getting bid on anyway. They will tweak this thing up to publishing it, and then maybe even after the fact.

You would have to call Load Control a few hrs out. If you are not a DAL employee they will not tell you, nor can you even get through.

Great fact, it is the way we used to run the airline in the summer.