plus no lock for new equipment, new base, first upgrade. In a supplemental bid you could feasibly train pilots to do stuff they bid off of before ever having done it...like SQ class.

Thanks for the correction. I went by the date I forwarded them to my personal email, not the date they sent them. Appreciate it!

Could you explain what you mean in detail?

Could be another way. This way if you bid Capt for mid year training 2020, you 2019 vaca bid will have you using your Capt seniority (relatively worse, and from the captain Vaca availability) for second half of 2020.

I'm sure you knew that, but just in case.

In some ways I see it benefiting the company, because it's less staffing compared to previous company.

Previous company, you could bid a great vaca using your FO seniority, then upgrade mid year and you kept it.

I agree, the scenario you present is good for the pilots. My point is that couldn't the same provision exist even with quarterly bids? Not knowing exactly (or even remotely) how the annual bid will work, I just see it being a little more difficult to plan from both a personal side and from the company side since I could be awarded something 14-15 months out, for example (awarded in August 2019, effective Dec 2020), but then get a whole new award in a supp bid before that. I guess I'll have to see how this bidding for effective/training dates works, because I haven't really seen that communicated. And if there are, for example, training dates spread throughout 2020, awarded/decided in 2019, but then another supp bid comes out, that just throws a wrench into that entire plan for the pilot and for the company. I'd rather just have pilots keep vacation but still have system bids every quarter. Or really, every couple months, with a closer in effective/training date than currently exists. Just seems more consistent and predictable, but again I don't have a good handle on how exactly it will work (and neither does anybody I've talked to about it).

Yep! I do the same thing, forward them to a personal account. Started after I looked for an archived message on the company server but it was magically gone.... 🤦🏻*♂️

Tex

Exactly why I do it!

Now I just gotta remember that I don't ALWAYS do it on the day it first hits the street!

Thanks again for catching my oops moment!

You seem hung up on what you would prefer or what you think would be easier for the company planning.

I get that, I'd rather a pilot just keep his awarded vacation and keep quarterly bids as well. But that system requires more captain staffing, because the company would have a steady trickle of FOs bidding summer/holiday vacations and then bidding captain. It was literally a strategy that was frequently used at my previous company. Then the company would have more captains on summer/holiday vacation than they staffed for. Good for pilots, bad for the company.

They would not tolerate that, so they did this annual bid. Is it really harder for the company to plan a year out? I suspect they will staff at the bare minimum of their future 12-16 month growth plan. Then run supplemental bids as needed. More complicated? Yep. Room to get it all dorked up with supplemental bids that have effective dates before the annual bid effective dates? Yep. Do they care? Maybe, but certainly not more than having more captains on summer/holiday vacation than they staffed for.

Just my read of the situation.

I'm not hung up on anything, nor am I looking at it from a standpoint of what I want personally...but yeah, what I think is easier for the company is part of (well really the whole crux of) the discussion, as I see it as a lose-lose, hence why I am asking for an explanation on how an annual bid (and supplementals) helps the company and/or the pilot group vice quarterly (or other more frequent) bids. I get that the vac awards are predicated on the annual bid right before the vac bid. But I don't see your scenario of bidding FO vacation then upgrading being worse for staffing than having a big annual bid with random supp bids (also with up to year out effective dates) throwing a wrench into the previous annual bid. The way it is, people could game the system knowing a supp will most likely come out between now and next August, stay FO on this annual, get FO summer vacation, then throw CA in on the supplemental. I just don't see a lot of people making CA vs FO bid decisions based on one year of awarded vacation. But again maybe I'm missing something.

Just curious, what is the industry norm for system bids? Does any other airline have an annual system bid in August projecting vacancies for the entire following calendar year? I'm not aware of any that do. Perhaps there is a reason for that? I just see it, from my standpoint, as yet another contrarian thing with no good reasoning behind it and with no benefit to either the pilot group or the company.