Xdashdriver

Assigning the max credit to the week of vacation and assigning credit to both INV days is the best starting point, since the software will then not need to award you as much flying to get to the LCW. Then, enter a bid preference of Prefer Off and list the days off you want consecutively, starting from the one closest to your vacation on out as far as you want to go. Leave some room on one end of the month or the other for some trips to be awarded, and then put in positive "award pairings" preferences to tell the software what kind of flying you want it try to put in there, relaxing your criteria as you go. Obviously the higher average credit per day, the fewer days it will have to put flying on you to get you to the LCW. If it cannot find you enough flying with the days you have left open on your schedule to get you to the LCW min, then it will start denying your preferences in reverse order that you entered them, generally speaking. Every time it denies a preference, it looks to see if a trip can be awarded with that one preference denied, and if so, then it awards the trip and looks to see if you're above min LCW. If you are, it stops. If not, it continues with the process until it gets you above min LCW, then it stops and there's your line. You will then have to fine tune it in DOT. Needless to say, the more senior you are, the more likely you are to get what you want.

Back2future

It sounds like you came up with a pretty good solution for vacation. What happens if you only use 15 credit for a week of vacation? Is there a pool of open vacation weeks where you can pick up another week or can you bank vacation year to year or both?
Do you have the ability to not assign specific days in the month for vacation? I think Delta has something like that where they can choose to have the vacation credit for the month but not be locked into specific days.

Thanks

CantStayAway

The amount of vacation days you get per year is already black and white in the contract so you’re not going to be able to add more by banking your hours.

As for the second question that is something that NavBlue offers but it has not been released as to whether or not we have negotiated for that for us. My guess is that we will have that but that’s just a guess.

singlepilot

As long as we discussing vacation is it safe to assume if someone has 15 days vacation.
(a 2-5 year pilot) one can take the entire month off if desired?
15 days X 5 hours=75

NWSteeringArmer

if you’re awarded 2 weeks of vacation in the same month, sure... I’ve gotten 30 days off in a row with 6 days of vac and I wasn’t very senior when I did that

Powderkeg

I’m far from being up to speed on PBS but I don’t think you’ll see your scenario again under PBS. You got that much time with trip touching, and that won’t happen under PBS. You’ll slide your vacation, add the INV days you choose and then the schedule will be built AROUND your vacation. I’m thinking the only way to get a month off in the future will be to use two weeks of vacation and assign them 35 hours each.

fcoolaiddrinker

or vac back to back bid periods and have the month off bridge bid periods.

ReserveCA

and what did we get for giving up line bidding..........oh ya narrow body industry BOTTOM wages for North American instead of the world.....
and spirit make more than us (321 override)

Aero1900

A 47% pay raise, an increase in retirement contributions and a signing bonus.

fcoolaiddrinker

why do you like line bidding so much? It wastes hours of my time every bid period. We secured the average vacation drop credit. Plus a training day is more valuable. Rgs is more than likely going away. I’ll give you I’m losing credit for pc/pt drops but I was never able to bid that anyhow. I dropped 36 credit with my jan vac. Then had to spend days fixing the mess that was left. I’m 50% in domicile and looked at every line and bid for max credit. I’ll take our vac language/credit over nk 321 override language all day. So would most pilots.