69boeing

I had a carry in conflict in July and ended up losing a 35 hour trip so I find myself for the first time ever submitting a make up bid. It's nearly impossible to get an answer from the scheduling people and the information online is limited. I'm hoping someone here can give me an answer from experience.

My question is "How does the computer pick my bid choices?"

To be specific, I only want to work the last week. My submitted max make up time was about 39 hours. My first choice was individual trips for a 5 day period for a total of 30 hours. (I realize they all need to be available). My second choice was a single trip that overlapped some of (but not all) the days and was about 35 hours. If they are both available, will the system pick the second choice because it's a closer match to my max time of 39 hours? The help screen in VIPS says "This sequence of processing will continue for each of your subsequent bids until your targeted make-up limit has been achieved."

I'm okay with it stopping at my first choice. All of my subsequent choices will have the same calendar footprint...

Thanks for any input!

FDXLAG

Bid as many lines as possible with trips that are acceptable to you. They assign CIC in seniority order. In theory they should look at your first line, if it is all available you get it. If any trips are gone they move down your list. If no lines are valid you get squat. Trips you bid sometime disappear between your input and when they work the list. Again request as many lines as you can. Unless you are the top 3.

69boeing

So if I get awarded my first choice, there's still some hours remaining in my submitted max makeup. Does the system keep trying to get to that max?

kronan

Makeup trips you request will be assigned to you if available, don't ask for anything you don't want...and it will build up to whatever credit value you wish. But if you ask for 39, and only 6 of what you want is available it'll build to 6. It's not like VTO where you can/will wind up for things you never requested...it's a makeup bid.

only important safety tip is that if you ask for that cool 39ch carryover trip into August, might get it but that'll simply mean only a few hours of pay in your July bid month, which could be exactly what you'd prefer some other time

kronan

My submissions for CIA trips go trip by trip, I don't build a weeklong request.

Simply build my weeks request with trip1, next rqst-trip2, und so weiter

69boeing

So, let me ask the question in a different way...

If I get awarded a trip on the 25th, does that mean that every subsequent bid that involves the 25th is off limits and therefore rejected?

fdx727pilot

Yes. If any trip on one line (or bid) is not available, as mentioned above, the whole line is discarded. If they get to the end of your requested trips and are still short of your requested makeup CHs, they stop. They won't add other trips or R days to get you to your desired BLG. I ended up with a 50 CH line one month due to not entering enough requests.

FDXLAG

Let's say you ask for trip 102 on the 25th. It is the only trip you really want so you put it on every line. Trip 102 on the 25th gets pulled for training. You get nothing.

Adlerdriver

I think guys have covered this but I'll just emphasize that each input line has to be a valid bid with all the trips from that input going into your calendar legally. You can't put 3 trips that all have the same footprint on input #1 like you can on a VTO.

I've always treated each input as an individual bid that doesn't rely on bids that come before or after. Maybe that's unnecessary but it's worked.

What I mean is if I have 6 combinations of possible trips that all included pairing #100, then I would put those 6 combinations in as 6 complete, individual inputs in my preference order. So, each input line would start with pairing #100 followed by the first combination of trips that went legally together with it.

Maybe you could put in trip #100 as input number one with the other trip combinations in subsequent input lines but that leaves you open to getting one of the combinations without trip 100 (if it's no longer available). That may not be what you want.

memhubturn

I have some CIC hours because 2 trips were knocked out for recurrent training. If I choose not to submit a makeup bid do those hours just go into General Makeup?