A rotation is a one to four day work schedule as such:

A line of time is a monthly schedule comprised of days off and scheduled rotations:

The bid packages are available for download in electronic form and also published on paper as you can see on my pilot schedules section of the website.

For the month of January, I am approximately 160 out of about 385 first officers on the MD-80 first officer position in my base. So I’ll list 160 lines of time, which I’d like to fly in order of preference.

Sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn’t with the help of modern technology.

Easy Bid
I use a program named EasyBid which automatically downloads bid packages, accepts my preferences, sorts the lines of time according to my customized preferences, and then uploads my choices back to the schedule computers for processing.

Commuting
I commute from Phoenix, Arizona to Atlanta. There are a variety of reasons for this, but in the spirit of brevity, I’ll cover that at a later time.

As a commuter, my goal is to minimize self-paid hotel stays. For example, if my trip departs at 6:00am in the morning, I need to leave the afternoon before my trip starts, pay for a hotel room and lose time that I could have spent at home.

Also, if my rotation ends after the last flight from Atlanta to Phoenix, I’ll have to purchase a hotel room and leave on the flight in the morning.

As you can see, the earliest I can report is after 2:30pm to give myself another flight backup if the first flight cancels. It’s absolutely your responsibility to show up to work on time and well rested. You always want to leave a back up in case the inevitable cancellation occurs or for some reason you cannot ride the jumpseat if the flight is too full.

We have a 'call in honest' policy so if you aren't able to get on two consecutive flights that would arrive in a reasonable amount of time prior to your scheduled check in time, you won't get in trouble. But just don't use the 'Get Out of Jail" free card too often.

The latest I can arrive in Atlanta at the end of my rotation and still make it home the same evening is about 6:30pm. This will enable me opportunity to put my flight kit in my locker and check-in for my flight home in a timely manner.

So I’ll instruct EasyBid to consider rotations starting after 1430 (2:30pm) and arriving no later than 1830 (6:30pm) as “commutable”:

This will instruct EasyBid to sort the lines of time with the most commutable lines from most to least.

Days off
I’m a pretty simple guy, this month, I just want to try to maximize my weekends off to spend more time with Kristie when she's not slaving away at the engineering firm. I’ll instruct the software to sort the lines of time from the most weekends off to the least amount:

Preferences Preferences Preferences!
There are a wide variety of other preferences that you can select in EasyBid. Choices range from preferred layover cities, to the length of the hotel stay, to the lines with the most pay, et cetera.

Usually when there is something important that I need to get to or Kristie wants me to get a particular day off in the next month, I'll enter that preference into EasyBid and resort the lines of time.

But let’s just look at two preferences now.

After my preferences are entered, EasyBid will show me what it thinks are the top 160 lines of time that match my preferences:

I can move, cut, paste and edit the order of the lines of time, but at this point, I’m more or less satisfied, so I’ll upload them to the scheduling computer and wait until the 15th of the month to see what I was awarded.

After the bids are processed, you’re issued a number corresponding to a line-of-time.

Everyting is processed with respect to seniority. The most senior pilot gets his first choice, the second most senior pilot gets his first choice, as long as the most senior pilot hasnt' chosen it and so on. Seniority is absolutely everything when it comes to bidding your schedule.

After the bid award is posted on your schedule, we have other opportunities like trip swaps, exchanging trips with others that haven’t been assigned pilots and a variety of other methods.

But in a nutshell, that’s how we bid our monthly schedules..