BA to use Carmen rostering fleetwide!
 

Mole says BA have already signed a preliminary deal with the Swedish computer services company to replace BA's "bidline system" of rostering, where pilot seniority has an input into destinations and work levels, with a blanket, company-rostered 900 hours per pilot per year.

Carmen website openly boasting of massive productivity gains by airlines that have initiated it. By implication, anyone not using it is likely to be at an industry-killing disadvantage.

Tough luck on BA's longhaul commuters who fly-in for work periods. Once a company-produced roster is in place all will have to live near LHR for the flexibility the system proclaims to work. Tough luck on anyone wanting a life outside BA - the system in use at LGW for crews there just ignores any preferences until all work covered. Should be fun in longhaul as any social commitment is all but unworkable in advance. More pilot divorce to come.

"Mood music" AKA the 'change process' has already started at BA with much clever abuse of existing bidline process by mgmnt designed to force Carmen onto the agenda.

Anyone from KLM or Wideroe care to comment, the Carmen website says your productivity has soared. Got any kind of life left?

Me, I'm just a robot - I dont need a life.

Yeah and they can drop in a 50% paycut as well because it would require the same change of contract. Carmen is already in use in the line building process anyway.

Next.

If Carmen is introduced on longhaul then they'd have to change the MBT days ie. 4 days off after a SIN or NRT, 3 off after a SEA, etc... - in which case I can't see how they could cover all the work! We'd probably end up with more days off, especially on the 777.

While you're on here Lloyd, how about 3 day SFOs/LAXs with 8 days off after (1 day per time zone change)? Sorry, I forgot that you want to have your cake and it eat too.

As I have already reached just over 850hrs in the previous 12 months under the "inefficient" bid line rules I would be very interested to see how Carmen could squeeze those last couple of trips in!

drivel, drivel, drivel.

If the rumours about the company imposing EG300 on the cabin crew are true, then why not Carmen on the pilots? They are both going to be met with equal ferrocity if you ask me.

So what if they can't squeeze any more hours out of us. An unhappy workforce is an efficient workforce! Well that seems to be BA management's philosophy anyway.

Shortfinalfred
Are you cabin crew? Seems that all you do is spread misinformation or complete lies about BA. Quite frankly most of the stuff you write is the very reason that so few real pilots bother to read Pprune any more.

At the moment most of the LH guys are constantly nudging the 900hr limit. There can be no possible increase in their output. That's the law.

Bid Line Rules are the contract of employment. They cannot simply be changed at the whim of the company.

I was talking to Paul Douglas last week and he confirms again and again that BA have no plans to replace BLR. Not sure how how he can put it any other way.

Pprune used to be a great place for pilots to swap gossip and talk shop. It was also THE place for those wanting to join the profession to get a feel for what to expect. Now all it is is a place for the bitter and twisted to vent their spleen against organisations that they are clearly not a part. I have issues with BA but they are mainly fairly small in the global over view. Here are the FACTS for those who sometimes think it is all doom and gloom.

1. Starting pay is better than it has ever been in all my 30 years in the company. Variable pay is shared equally. Unthinkable 5 years ago when the variation could be several thousand pounds a month in variable pay alone between top and bottom.

2. The pension is not as good. But that is just the way it is for pensions. That is a factor of the society we live in not BA. on the plus side you will be able to work past 55 if you so wish. Something for which many of my past colleagues would have killed.

3. BLR are the same as they always have been for the last decade and more. In fact when they were first introduced the junior pilots just did reserve. Thats all they did for year after year. The system now is 100% better. You will be able to plan your life after you get your roster and once you are 50 from the bottom you will into the nirvana of trip lines.

4. Command time will be 12 years SH and 15 years LH. That is about right and the average in my time in the airline. 10 years ago SH commands were a 20plus years. Bitter young men have short memories.

5. Flying aeroplanes is good fun. The guys you fly with are bright, quick witted and if your flightdeck hasn't got the sound of laughter in it then you are doing something wrong.

Carmen is probably a good system, but, like any computer system, it all depends on how you program it.
KLM 737 fleet have been using carmen for 10 years now, and the company is happy with it. Pilots are divided. (I hate it!!!)
They now tried to implement it on the 747 fleet, and "forgot" to add the labour agreement. It instantly cost the company in the range of 2000!!! extra off days to pilots before turning the system off again.
So make sure you are there when they program the system, and you shoudl be okay I guess.

Spuis

It all gets so tiresome in here some times!

Pilot: "Im sorry darling, we simply must divorce, BA are bringing in Carmen"
Pilots missus: "Carmen! the slut"

Jouer le Jeux as the french say

BA can solve it's pilot shortage problem very easily - almost 50% of our female pilots are now on maternity leave!!! Get back to work!!!;)

And I believe the remaining 50% are on PTWK!

Haven't you lot got a company forum for this stuff ?

Just below cap - Hear hear!!

If only more people shared our views.

Shortfinalfred,
Are you sure you have your facts correct??? I have just transferred from LGW where carmen worked a hell of a lot better there than it does here in LHR WW! And as for commuters, it does not make a blind bit of difference. Plenty of other airlines use carmen to great effect including virgin. However, BA simply do not seem to have the full package in operation!

Why is it when ever they change something in BA , you guys are all up in arms about it?? Big deal things change in life and you just get used to it. Bunch of unionised wimps i say.

You've all got it wrong.

The thinking behind rolling out Carmen fleetwide is to "continue the British Airways philosophy of giving greater lifestyle choice to staff whilst maintaining an efficient and robust operation."

That's what it says here, at least........

GM, Ops Planning

Revman :ok:
If only I were as articulate!!! lol!

Justbelowcap - well done! Great post. Nice to see common sense and balanced view instead of a lot of childish tantrums that we increasingly see.

apaddyinuk,

With all due respect how can you say Carmen versus Bidline would make no difference to commuters? You are cabin crew - you don't have bidline......

That's because whenever something changes it is for the worse!
Nowadays it is normal practice in BA, unfortunately. Employees fear the news of changes, as they are taking more and more things away.

However, I don't know about pilots' rosters, but we CC at LGW have Carmen and once you learn how to use it it's great.
I started off by swearing at the woman every month, then started bidding in a smarter way about 10 months ago and have had 10 months of great rosters, giving me my preferred duties and a bit of a "routine".
I know that for LH rules are different, but I believe that the secret is to learn how to deal with the woman. After that, you're sorted. (same as with the missus!)

Come on Nigels, Cheer up!!!!!!!!! :}

FBW:)

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.