jdavk

We have a G-Line so we don’t have to guess.

01110011

At the expense of seniority abrogation. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised by a line than get a “bid group failed” due to someone junior to me having a training event or a vacation or something.

hummingbear

Proper staffing is the only solution. More reserves is great- if that means hiring more people. If it means using the same number of pieces & just bumping a bunch of junior lineholders onto RSV, you’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul by creating more open trips that need RSV coverage. If you’ve got 1,000 pilots & 1,200 pilots worth of flying it doesn’t matter if they’re all on RSV- you can’t preserve the integrity of your operation. Not sure what’s so complicated about that.

Cant say as I’m entirely surprised, though. The more I’ve been watching it, the more I’ve seen some really wasteful patterns with PPU. In many ways, they’ve become as accustomed to the practice as many of our pilots have.

That’s why I just roll my eyes now when I hear anything about “we’ve got to get PPU under control”, or wanting better RSV utilization. Use the pieces you have. If it isn’t enough, get more pieces or take on less work. And if you’re just going to keep throwing money at the problem, stop complaining that you’re throwing so much money at the problem. Not super complicated.

fadec

The G-line forces the system to backtrack up the list and take trips from more senior people to ensure the bottom guys have legal lines. Where it stops is referred to as the "splat line" and that is hidden and moves every month depending what PBS needs. Line holders below the splat line are no longer purely seniority bidding. Without the G-line, trips could be assigned in seniority order with no backtracking. When there are no more trips the rest are on reserve. If some global parameter isn't met then it could adjust a metric and start again from the top. This is hardly "solving" as we know it. It's merely assigning trips in seniority order, which is actually what we want. We don't need or want a solver. It's not chess.

As it stands now we're allowing the company to play chess by giving up seniority bidding. Sit down and think about this. Write a program to produce a line for the most senior pilot. It shouldn't depend on anyone junior. And so it goes for each successively junior pilot until all trips are taken. This is a very simple process. It only needs to look ahead at the remaining trips to ensure coverage. When a day touches N trips and there are N line holders remaining then it starts using that as a constraint. If it can't build a full line then that's where partial reserve comes in. Junior partial line holders would probably be assigned trips on Christmas and some reserve days earlier in the month. ​​​

TFAYD

you will still need a solver with category bidding as there is not a one-to-one correlation.

and without globalization the best course of action for the company would be to put everyone below the splat line on reserve and then assign trips manually in a similar fashion as PBS would have done it

jdavk

You need to spend some time reading the PBS Newsletter as your assertions are largely incorrect.