Since this was a company "ask", I'm obviously skeptical. I'm making an attempt to see this from all angles and find the potential pitfalls. Obviously vacation is a big concern - How big is still pending, IMO. Bigger playing field on which to hit the same target with your 5-day slide for one. Since the vacation for next year will be complete before this might be ratified, that playing field would most likely move from what was expected during the bid.
Days off gets affected by this as well. Right now a reserve pilot gets a minimum of 168 days off per year. All but two 6 week BP combinations drops that number by one to three days.
Paychecks will probably get even harder to figure out than they are already.
One LEC rep is of the opinion that 6-week BPs will be good for week on/week off patterns. According to him, as it stands now, with a 4-week and 5-week month back to back, there are situations where a pilot must work two of those weeks in a row. A 6-week bid period would alleviate this (good, I guess if you work wo/wo). He also seems to think that there will be just two of these 6 week periods per year (one sometime in the spring and one prior to peak). If that's the case, then we would have to have ten 4-week BPs and no 5-week BPs to keep 12 BPs per year. Otherwise we get 11 or 10 total (with the other combinations using two 6-week BPs).
Personally, I remain skeptical. If this is an exploitable option without clear boundaries - the company will do so to the max extent possible.
I did some quick (for me) math and found out there are 15 possible combinations of 4, 5 and 6 week bid periods that fit into a calendar year. If you consider that sometimes the last bid period may encroach on January of the new year, there may be a couple more iterations - not sure.
My point is this: There is nothing in our existing contract or the TA that specifically states we have to have 12 bid periods per year called "Jan, Feb, Mar, etc". They could decide to call them bid period 1 through 9, since eight 6-week and one 4-week make a round 52 weeks. Maybe they have the last one go 2-weeks into January or some other kung-fu we haven't thought of.
I'm not sure how big an issue this is yet but I think it needs to be looked at. I simply throw these numbers and some initial concerns out for everyone to think about.
Here are the 15 possible combinations I came up with: Sorry for the formatting.
4w-5w-6w-Ttl periods-Annual days off
8 4 0 12 168
3 8 0 11 167
9 2 1 12 168
4 6 1 11 167
10 0 2 12 168
5 4 2 11 167
0 8 2 10 166
6 2 3 11 167
1 6 3 10 166
7 0 4 11 167
2 4 4 10 166
3 2 5 10 166
4 0 6 10 166
0 2 7 9 165
1 0 8 9 165