I notice that junior pilots to me keep getting what I ask for. This month I see two such pilots.

Is there any help available to assist a pilot in making sure they are entering the bids correctly? I would even pay someone to bid for me so I can see what they are doing and understand what it takes to make the computer think the way I need it to think in order to protect myself.

I recall something called...prefbids. I can't find it on the internet and I can't find it in the PBS help guide that UAL has on its PBS help tab or in the system staffing documents under flight ops. There is an email address or phone number???

 

On the PBS page, top right, it shows "Need help?" prefbid.com.

I used it for the first time MUCH later than I should have. It has a link for a live chat, and the guy helped me in just 5 minutes to understand some of the misconceptions I had about how to set up the logic in this thing.

He was extremely knowledgeable, a pilot, and made it easy to understand.

For we "old school" programmers (yes, I learned things like FORTRAN and BASIC), the logic is not exactly the same....that was the root of most of my problems. I thought it used ALL statements/commands as it went top to bottom....not true.

Someone said it is like a pinball machine...after it goes through one set of obstacles, it directs the course of further commands...not necessarily meeting ALL commands.

The last ALPA email I got (for Feb) from System Scheduling had some excellent pointers in it as well.

 

+10000 for Prefbid.com. Use the live help when they're online as they can log into your bids and see exactly what you did/wanted to do/need to do in the future.

Works very well and they know what they're doing. You may not like the answers of why you didn't get what you wanted, but it's very helpful for the next month.

Oh, and be *very* careful with using 'SET CREDIT RANGE to X' as if it can't award you a legal line with that in there, the entire group will fail. Do one group with the SET CREDIT range and then immediately after that group, do another group without the CREDIT RANGE. You might be surprised that you get the award.

 

The waive and set commands can significantly widen out the ability of PBS to award a line. If someone junior to you drops all the default limits built into a vanilla bid group then PBS might be able to award a line to them but not to you. Warning, this can get quite ugly. I stopped using these after I was awarded one such month of flying. The "set" commands probably won't change anything but theoretically they widen the bid group.

WAIVE Min Days Between Work Blocks 1
WAIVE 1 in 7 Day off in Base
WAIVE Double Duty Restriction
WAIVE Duty in consecutive WOCLs
SET Max Length Of Work Blocks to 19 day(s)
SET Max Number Of Work Blocks to 19

Prefbid.com is a great resource. Also, as a learning tool, it's very easy to file a Dispute. Simply say "pilot xyz got an award that I thought should go to me." They will tell you the logic of why it happened. Sometimes it's not your bidding, but some other constraint (carry in, vacation credit). Either way, you'll learn something.

 

Understood. Will look at prefbid.

what is significant about the number 19 (other than the paul hardcastle reference to the average age of the combat soldier in Vietnam)??

 

Max number of work days.

 

What type of results have you gotten from parameters such as "set credit range low"? Is there a workaround if that is truly your desire?

 

Can you please explain what the "Set max num of wrk blocks to 19 DAYS" is asking from the bid logic? What does the same bid group do without that line?
Can you please explain what the "Set max num of wrk blocks to 19" is asking from the bid logic? What does the same bid group do without that line?

TIA

 

As far as I know, since there is no default on work blocks, it does nothing if trying to loosen parameters. I should have left that one off, and set max length of work block as well. Set max work blocks is meant to restrict blocks of flying, typically for commuters. Since there is no PBS default on work blocks it would only be used to restrict the number of work blocks, not relax them.

 

I don't know. In the old days when there were a lot of one-day trips in the bid package, using the waive min days between work blocks to one day, you could get one day trips all month long and if there is one is a day off between each trip using the waive, then each trip is also a block. However, in a 31 day bid month, the most blocks you would get would be 16 if you had all separated one day trips/blocks.

The contractual min days off is 12. A bid month of 31 days minus 12 is 19, so maybe that's where 19 comes, although it's not possible to have 19 separate work blocks in a month.