Hi

We have had Carmen/PBS at SAS for quite a while now.
It is absolute crap!
Sure it might be ok if You live next door to the airport, but for everybody else it doesn´t cut it.
It lives on the notion that everybody is happy if they are guarantied to be off on a couple of specific days, again works ok if You are next door!
To me the only solution is linebidding with triptraiding so one can pick up a line that works the best in the month to come and we would still be flying our hours.
But apparently management hates the idea of happy and effective employees with control over their own time.

Regards

Heavydane

Trust me on this one,

They can and will get away with all sorts of slow gradual degradation of T&C's (hotac etc) but bidline is untouchable. If they try to ditch bidline it'll be game over.

Flaps62 has hit the nail on the head :ok:
If they try to implement this, there will be a strike - I promise you. :E

...and you believe anything that the Prince of Darkness says? :yuk:

But surely a bidline system is only good for those at the top of the seniority list?

For the many, many more who are at the bottom of the list the bidline system is not greeted with such enthusiasm. After all, who wants to fly the trips that nobody else wants for years?

In my 40-odd years of flying I have flown for airlines without the bid system (except one) and it has been much fairer not to have such a nasty system and for everything to be shared out equally.

I hasten to add that I am now No.1 on the present list but I still fly the roster that is given to me without complaint.

Maybe some of you are about to learn what coffee actually smells of!

Speak for yourself. I've been at the bottom end of bid line and the bottom end of a preferencing system and I'll take bid line any day of the week. I still got all the sh*t at the bottom end of the preferencing system. At least with bidline I can guarantee one decent trip per month, even if it is over a weekend, rather than month after month of drudgery. I can also see if I've been shafted and take action to correct it, something which is impossible under Carmen.

Totally with carnage matey, used Carmen at LGW, it was actually OK, as it was an improvement over the previous take what your given school of rostering. But i did work pretty hard at bidding and when it went wrong it went spectacularly wrong for me. On that fleet i was pretty senior but i'm way more satisfied with the Bidline system even in the bottom 20 of a 580 FO fleet.

I have to be careful what i bid for and it takes an hour or so a month and worst case is i get a blind line with a preferencing system. Which is all i had at LGW!

So why don't you all sit back and let it happen? Everytime you make an input you screw up at least three other pilots.

If you were just to sit on your fingers for a couple of months and let the system happen, you might just possibly remember how it was that you made a 2-day stop over on Juhu Beach in Bombay really enjoyable.

Sharing grief has always been a large part of my life and my aviation career. I have never ever been considered by anyone to be a selfish person.

JW411 - I do see you argument, but I disagree and I am right at the bottom of a fleet that will see no new joiners on the bottom for a long while.

I get some choice and I have a good lifestyle. The system is transparent inasmuch as I can see who has what and that the rosterers haven't been accepting bottles of whisky to sort someone out.

It works well because the lines are built randomly in the first place. One man's good line is anothers nightmare. The fact that people bid for different things means you don't get stuck with dross all the time.

I have worked on an allocation system before and that was naff.

Having said that, I don't think that the top of the list should get all they want all the time (if there is no movement in the list), so perhaps a little tweak with variable seniority for 3 months a year on static lists would work well. On balance, I would prefer bidline as Carmen is opaque and open to fiddling from bent rosterers (and lets be honest, we have all seen that!).

It also means you cannot put in fiddly requests, like "every thursday night off, but I don't mind if I work in the day" which you CAN do with bidline.

How exactly do you know that the rostering staff are not in receipt of the odd bottle and 200?

Because Bids are allocated by seniority and our bidding programs automatically check for out of seniority awards.

So your computer system is totally sacrosanct and could not ever possibly be corrupted by a computer genious such as my son (who is 18)!

JW

You obviously don't understand Bidline and how it works.

The allocation system is totally transparent.

If you are mishandled in some way it is always picked up and dealt with appropriately.

You can give all the bribes in the world. Doesn't make any difference. It can't.

You couldnt fiddle the system, we can download every roster in the company and its this that the programs check.

[quote]Everytime you make an input you screw up at least three other pilots.[quote]

Well thats a nice 'fact' which you've just made up. Evidence please?

That'll be the one night stop in Bombay then? You really need to get up to date here. As it happens thats one of my favourite trips - daylight flight out, good food when you get there. Even better if it departs on a weekend. Like Jetstream says, one mans good line is anothers nightmare.


Don't be so hard on yourself, I'm sure flying with you wasn't that bad.

Bidline has two failings:
1. If there is no movement in seniority, it can be a bit harsh on the juniors.

2. It is complex, so a lot of people, especially those outside the company and new guys don't understand it.

As regards number one, I still think it is better than an allocated or Carmen system - those rostering systems are worse for choice, even if you are junior.

As regards 2, if the company/BALPA taught people a bit more about it, then the learning curve wouldn't be so steep. However, once you have learnt it, it outshines the rest by a long way.

There cannot be any fiddling in the main process - the only scope for fiddling is with overtime outside the bid process, but if you DON'T want extra work you don't really mind who gets it and the fiddling is only possible if you want overtime.

True.

Not really. Bidline Rules as a whole do take up an entire folder however, the work allocation system is totally transparent, so no-one can be stitched up and can be summed up in one phrase:

The more senior, the more choice.

Simply put, you bid for several lines of work. There is one line per pilot. The most senior pilot will get his (her) first choice. The second most senior will have to put in two choices to be guaranteed of one, the third most senior, three lines and so on. The fact that everyone bids for different things means satisfaction levels are very high. I remember getting my first choice once, despite being over two thirds of the way down a long list at the time.

Just to squash the subject of this thread completely, today a senior BA Flt Ops manager, initials PD, has written to all BA pilots; part of his letter reads:

If BA attempt to make changes to Bidline, BALPA will ballot the membership

Seniority under UK Law and already under certain aspects of EU Law is discriminatory. It follows that within a couple of years anyway a new system may have to be sourced that eliminates seniority issues. This act will become more pertinent as of 2006 when you all have theoption to remain in employ until the age of 60.

Not true, the new law does have exceptions for jobs where seniority can be justified by experience.