Schedule availability
 

If the monthly bids close on the 12th, it takes the computer system 5 days to figure out the FOs schedule?!?! What are they running the program on, a Tandy 1000?!?!

IT company with wings

Due to fact that FOs get to avoid Captains in their pbs bid, FO lines are not run until Captains are done. Captains due 15th. That's why it takes so long.

If the monthly bids close on the 12th, it takes the computer system 75 hours to figure out the CAs schedule?!?! What are they running the program on, a Tandy 1000?!?!

Yeah, but why does it take three days to run the captain lines? If electricity travels at roughly the speed of light, and it’s all done on a computer, how many light years away are the computers they use? Are they outsourced to a galaxy far, far away? Hell, it only takes 2 minutes for a flight plan to get from the computer to the printer….

TW

67%

67%

67%

67%

Commodore 64..Fo sho!

That'd be an upgrade from the Vic20 currently in use.

Obviously they are using a 3 bit machine because we can't put in more than 7 discrete criteria (H++ H+ H N L L- L--)

At least the old system you could put your avoid or desire preference from 1-1000. So when you have 900+ trips to pick from you get to put them into only 7 weighted categories now, and it still takes 5 days to figure them out.

Its likely poor coding as well as a slow processor. Not to mention the PBS interface which is like learning a new language.

We deserve better.

This will be the 3rd time I've heard "we will fix this BS next time" when it comes to CAL's horrible PBS. I lack optimism that words will ever translate to action.

There is only one reason, and one reason only, why the schedules take over five days to be published, and that is because the contract says that they have until midnight on the 17th to publish them. They are all probably done micro-seconds after the Captains lines are run, but "you'll get nothing and like it Spaulding" is their motto. They won't give you anything unless it's in writing, and even then we have to fight them for it far too frequently. Please remember this next time they ask you for a favor.

The only sensibly post of the lot.

For the naysayers that lack optimism that the PBS system will be fixed, be part of the solution and not the problem. Support your MEC and turn your complaints into actions.

Actually, I believe the computer run is pretty quick. The delay is that the company and ALPA both review the line results for errors before they are released. At least that's the way it used to be. Shocking as it may seem, occasionally a United IT system contains errors so the manual part is in place to hopefully catch them

Every once in a while a new issue pops up. I had GDO's and vacation in Oct that I bumped together. Being in GUM, and bidding reserve, there was only 1 bid that the BAT would accept. Nobody from the ALPA or company PBS groups could figure out what was going on, and I'm not the only one (it's just exacerbated in GUM because of the compressed reserve option). Situations like this require work before, during, and after the program does its magic.

Just a little FYI and food for thought.

I think there is another reason besides the CBA.

I think the company has the ability to "massage" the results if they run into problems. I recall serious problems in the past whereby entire BES's (Base Equip Status) bids were flawed. I recall the EWR 737, EWR 756, IAH 756 (twice) and IAH 737 being so screwed up they had to re-run them. The runs and the re-runs affected thousands of pilots in cascading fashion. These issues took place in both November and December, two very important holiday months for pilots.

The company probably learned some lessons in those instances and wants to view and review the results and massage them if needed. I take exception to terms like "seniority within feasibility", "seniority homogenization", "overall solution constraints", etc. If we had something like seniority locking the schedules would be more in line with holding what your true seniority would allow and take away the company's ability to manipulate the award.

I have seen junior pilots to me get what I requested and I get something 180 out. No training conflicts, no vacation conflicts, no military leave conflicts, nada. You file a discrepancy and get shatt upon. you file a grievance and the union does nothing about it.

ALPA pushed for PBS but the company truly controls it. It is just not transparent enough for me.

Well said Staller. Myself and many others engaged our reps concerning the needed changes to the vast inadequacies of Cal sponsored PBS. Under the JCBA our requests were clearly not critical. We can certainly try again next time to help ensure we get schedules as technology allows. Thanks for keeping it constructive!

Captain results for October are up.

I'm not excusing them but I can make a comparison. I have another career in finance. We are testing an 18 page algorithm which probably has fewer paths on the decision tree than PBS.

The 24 hr a day run generally takes a week.

(PS. not a new hire, I dont know how to get the profile to reflect my 18 yrs of misery)

"New Hire" is your status on APC.

I've talked to people that deal with this kind of computer code on a regular basis, and I suspect that the complexity of the program (and others like it) is far greater than most people even begin to realize.

From what I understand, much of that time is the optimization. You give the computer more time, it will better optimize schedules to comply with as many preferences as possible.

It's amazing that a company so focused on costs does everything in their power to keep the employees with direct control of the throttles (and single largest variable cost) as ****ed off as possible.

...and sick list and on-time. You're right; nothing important.

This bears repeating. Nice.

Well said.

I'd like to know how many errors are "manually" caught by the company or ALPA per month.

I do think it's absolutely ridiculous that we cannot plan our life for next month until the 17th (at midnight!) of the month before. And some months, this includes the 29th-31th of the current month.

This MUST be addressed in the next contract... Bids packets released on the 1st, close on the 7th, awarded by the 12th

+1

And add the weird vacation calendar to the wish list. I know there is some "logic" somewhere in the past for the LUAL practice of the May-May cycle but it sure leaves folks who can bid summer vacation hanging until the last minute to make final plans.

I also hate the way we do our bid months. Most months seem to run 29th-29th or something stupid. I know they are trying to cut down as much as possible the 31-day months for reserves. Steal a day from January and March to make February 30 days and leave the rest of the months alone!

Almost all airlines do this - steal Jan 31 and Mar 1 to make Jan/Feb/Mar all 30 days each. Understandable.

But I'm pretty sure the reason we have it all messed up - adjusting the months and starting on the 28th/29th - is to have the summer months as 30 days and reduce the days off during peak flying. Granted, somehow every other airline I've flown for has fared just fine with May, July and Aug as 31 day months

It's called "Mason Months"; named after the guy who invented them. It's a windfall for the company that we won't get back. The interesting thing is they put in the L-UA C2000; the $$ was the bright shiny object and we all just stared at it.

More love blastmail
 

"Some of our highest costs come from transporting baggage. Buddy pass riders checked in more than 436,000 bags in 2013, increasing the strain on operations and driving a real increase in our fuel costs. To help offset this cost, for travel on or after Oct. 1, we will implement baggage fees for buddy pass riders only.

Buddy pass riders, excluding extended family buddies, will pay the same baggage fees as revenue customers, and the fees will be assessed regardless of cabin booked or flown and apply to all destinations. Those who bring oversized bags to the gate will be asked to return to the counter to pay for and check their bags."

I dug up this E-mail I saved that the SSC put out last November. It spells out the case for why we went with the Jepp PBS. I flew with a guy recently that was ranting about how awful the system is. He said that we also should have had classroom instruction. I asked him if he ever sat down with a PBS instructor in flight ops that were available for 6 months or called the help line. He never did. Prefbid.com? He had never heard of it:

System Schedule: Comments on Jeppesen PBS

Many of you have probably seen or wrote some of the emails and forum posts decrying the change from AD OPT PBS to Jeppesen PBS for l-UAL pilots. The SSC would like to address some of the issues raised in these discussions. First, let us say that if we had a choice, we would prefer that all pilots be able to stay on the system they’ve been used to for the last several years or, even better, go back to pre-built lines. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t going to happen. Most UAL decisions are based on cost. Contrary to popular belief however, Jeppesen PBS was not chosen because it’s the cheaper option. While the company does not share financial details of their contracts with third-party vendors, the PBS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for both legacy carriers are familiar with the general costs of these (and other systems). Since all the vendors compete in the same marketplace, they keep their costs pretty aligned. What makes more of a difference is the amount of resources the airline is willing to put into bringing the system online and supporting it. That cost would have been about the same for either system.

When evaluating the systems three years ago at the beginning of negotiations for the UPA, the JNC and SMEs considered many factors. It was a given that whichever pilot group had to learn a new system (or if both groups had to due to choosing a third system) that group would be less than pleased. We’re pilots, and many believe change is bad. From a technical point of view, both programs use the same optimization engine (CPLEX) and generally get to the same solution. The terminology and emphases are different but they produce similar results. The programs have differences in methodology that affect their ability to solve large problems. That fact became one of the big factors in Jeppesen’s favor: Jeppesen PBS has a demonstrated ability to solve the large (600+ pilots) 737 categories on the l-CAL side. Due to other work the l-UAL SMEs had done in evaluating PBS systems from many vendors, there was serious doubt that AD OPT could solve these problems without some major changes. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be made to handle those problems, it’s just the SMEs weren’t sure how hard it would be to get there and were concerned as to how it would affect solution quality.

Another factor in selecting Jeppesen was customization and interface. If you’ve been able to use the system you’ve seen one example of this: the Bid Analysis Tool. The Bid Analysis Tool provides a near real time analysis of your bid and shows an example line from your bid groups. This is an invaluable tool for all pilots. The l-UAL PBS SMEs have tried to get a feature like that in AD OPT PBS in the develop stage well before the system was implemented. Despite over 7 years of trying, we were unable to get AD OPT to add that feature. At one point, the company and AD OPT agreed in principle to add a comprehensive “legality checker” only to have AD OPT increase the cost well beyond what they had originally told the company. We took this as an indication that they were not really interested in creating a better interface and began looking at other vendors. Jeppesen PBS has customization features far beyond what’s available with the AD OPT system and, more importantly, that customization can be done in-house, eliminating the need to go to the vendor for changes. The company has dedicated support from within Flight Operations to make these changes. In fact, that dedicated support was able to identify and fix a few minor bugs “on the fly” during the practice bids 1 & 2. It has taken AD OPT months to fix those types of bugs in their PBS program. That doesn’t mean that we will get every little thing we want changed in the system but it’s much better than what we were able to achieve with the old system.

Much of the discussion decrying the change to Jeppesen PBS centers on the difficulty of changing to a new method of expressing preferences and how much more difficult it is to use. Some of the discussions express a love for the old system that really leaves us scratching our heads. It seems that as a group, we pilots have slightly selective memories and more than a little denial of the facts. The l-UAL PBS SMEs remember the hundreds and hundreds of complaints we fielded in the early years of PBS and the great frustration borne by the l-UAL pilot group until getting the system going. We have reviewed pilot bids for every category for every month since PBS’ inception. There are still pilots who, for no lack of trying in some cases, still don’t “get” bidding with points. Although to read some of the current discussions, one would think that AD OPT PBS is the most intuitive, easy to use system ever invented; our review of the bids shows otherwise. The PBS SMEs have a saying, “a number one bid is a terrible thing to waste”. Due to the difficulty in expressing preferences with points and lack of the tools we feel are needed (see the discussion on the Bid Analysis Tool above) there are too many pilots who are unable to express what they want in a line using AD OPT PBS and there are a lot of number one pilot positions being wasted. While Jeppesen PBS has its own set of problems when it comes to bidding, there are pilots who will find that this method better allows them to express their preferences.

All of the discussion about the G-line, seniority inversions, overly constrained parameters miss the point that both systems do the exact same thing in these respects. At l-UAL we didn’t talk about the G-line but it’s the same thing as the “minimum number of reserves”. Just as if you’re below the G-line, if you’re within the minimum number of reserves the system considers you a reserve and you will not get a regular line unless a senior lineholder gives up their line. In both systems, if you’re considered a reserve it is logically and contractually allowed for the system to leave you on reserve while a regular line goes junior to you if it is necessary to do so to grant a senior pilot’s bid. Conversely, if you are entitled to a regular line, a senior pilot’s bid cannot force you onto reserve. That behavior could be changed but the MEC elected to not allow lineholders to be forced onto reserve. In any scheduling system, if the category is over-constrained (too much or too little credit time for the number of pilots) it will not create schedules that grant pilots their preferences. The two legacy carriers discussed these items to different degrees and using different terms but the systems work the same in these respects.

Finally, there’s the discussion about training. During the negotiations for the bankruptcy contract, we were able to secure paid classroom training on PBS largely because we were successful in convincing the company that anything less would doom the system to failure. While that training was effective for many pilots, it didn’t work out very well for others (reference the bidding mistakes mentioned above). Some of that ineffectiveness may have been because pilots didn’t realize at the time how important it was to learn the system at the outset. We did find that in the contractually-mandated second set of “kiosks” many more pilots paid attention and took advantage of the one-on-one opportunity to refine their bids with a PBS Instructor. Under the current transition, while we were not able to get the company to bear the cost of classroom training, we were able to get them to spend a considerable amount providing other resources to train pilots from both legacy airlines on the system. The more effective one-on-one approach should result in more “targeted” assistance. We would have liked to have gotten both types of training but, that would be just one item on a long list of items scheduling and non-scheduling related that we would have liked to have gotten. Ask any of our l-CAL brethren and they’ll tell you the current training is light years beyond the training they received on the system when they first rolled it out.

PBS is complex and difficult no matter what system you use. Change is different. We don’t have an unlimited ability to get the company to spend money on everything we want (especially based on our company's financial performance). We just want you to know the facts. What we as union volunteers are trying to do is to make the system as “user-friendly” as possible, enforce the contract, and ensure the company lives up to its obligations to “Schedule with Safety”. We will continue to field your complaints and comments and will work to achieve those goals.

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