Troubleshooting

NOT ON THE BID LIST

One of the most common issues I hear about is “It’s telling me I’m not on the bid list” This can happen for a couple of reasons. To narrow down why, try logging into crewbids in your browser. (crewbids.__thecompanysite__.com) once you’re at the main page, navigate to “Reports” then click “View Other Bids”. From there, make note of your name and position as indicated below the white line. Are they correct? Now select the option circle for “Captain Bids” or “First Officer Bids” as appropriate. Then click on “Select Name” and look for your name. If your name does not appear in the list when it should OR it appears out of seniority order, then the problem lies on the company side. If your name appears correctly in the list then there may be something Blastro hasn’t encountered before. Please report this to me by selecting “Email Support” in the help menu, or emailing help@snizware.com

Blastro requires Google Chrome to work properly

Manually updating lines and bids files:

NOTE: THE MOST RECENT UPDATE SHOULD PREVENT YOU FROM HAVING TO PERFORM THIS PROCEDURE BUT IN CASE YOU STILL WANT TO TRY THIS:

Recently, multiple revisions to the files went out causing big issues reading the files. If you’re tech savvy enough and want to manually copy in the correct files, then feel free. To do it, navigate to the appropriate application folder. On windows, press Windows Key+R to open the run dialogue and type %appdata%\Blastro in it. Press enter and you’ll get to the program storage folder. On Mac you can acess the folder by opening Finder and pressing Command+Shift+G. Type: ~/Library/Application Support/Blastro and press return. If you remove lines.pdf and trips.pdf by highlighting them and pressing delete or dragging them to the trash, then copy in the appropriate file from an email attachment and rename the file (press F2 to rename a file in Windows, and on Mac simply press return) lines.pdf or trips.pdf as appropriate, you will be able to force Blastro to read the correct file. This process should not be necessary as long as the files are posted to the bidding website. If you do perform this, do not have it update the lines file automatically when it prompts you to or the file will revert to the version from online again.

Pay Form creation:

If you are experiencing any trouble with pay form creation, then I recommend selecting “Purge Schedule Data” from the Pay menu first. Ensure Blastro is configured to download the proper month’s schedule data by visiting the “Pay” menu and selecting “Define Pay Month.” Select the Month from the dropdown box, type in your line number, guarantee hours, and click on the days ON you were awarded for that month. Press OK. Save all of the PDF files you have for flight reservations for the month in a folder somewhere. In the “Pay” menu, select “Locate Flight Reservations” and navigate to the folder where you saved them. Note: The files themselves won’t appear in the dialog when you select the folder used. The dialog is only looking for the folder location not a specific file. If desired, check that your resident airport is correct by selecting “Set Resident Airport” in the “Pay” menu. After that, ensure Blastro knows your scheduling login information so it can retrieve your schedule. “Pay” -> “Update Scheduling Password”. Now you can select “Retrieve <Month> Schedule” once again from the “Pay” menu and it should log on and retrieve your schedule. Once it is finished it will tell you how many new duty blocks were retrieved. They can be viewed by selecting “View Retrieved Schedule” which will open the information in a text editor. You may have to resize the text editor horizontally to reveal all of the fields. If you can confirm that the information is correct, then “Fill In Pay Sheet” should work correctly. You will need some sort of spreadsheet software for viewing the resulting form. I recommend LibreOffice for anyone searching for a free solution. I use it for my Mac testing and it works well.

Logbook Export:

Logbook Export is pretty simple from a programming standpoint. If you can use “View Retrieved Schedule” to see what was retrieved, then you shouldn’t encounter any problems exporting your flights. The tricky part is locating the file which gets placed on your desktop, and getting your logbook program to read it properly. The flights are saved as a CSV file which stands for “Comma Separated Values.” Any logbook program that can read CSVs (Most can) will be able to import from here. If you want to see the information being imported, CSV files can be opened in multiple ways. Notepad on the PC and TextEdit on the Mac are the simplest solutions but for a nicer presentation, any spreadsheet software like Excel, LibreOffice, WPS, etc. will also be able to open them.

I can only speak for Logbook Pro since that is what I use, but I have reports that LogTen Pro also successfully opens the exported CSV file.

Logbook Pro: Open the “File” menu and select “Import Wizard…” Click “Comma Delimited”, then “Browse” for the file. From the “Look In” dropdown, select your Desktop and Locate the Flights.csv file and click “Select”. The source format of the flight times can be Hours.Tenths OR HH:mm since Blastro saves duration as well as Block Out and In times. If you have Logbook Pro doing auto-fill, I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to check that or not. I don’t since mine auto-fills the PIC column, and some of the time I’m PIC and sometimes I’m not. It’s just easier to enter it after the fact. In the “Overwrite Mode” selection I highly recommend selecting “Append to Data” and then remove any existing flights in the next screen. Otherwise prior duplicate entries will be replaced in your logbook and any info you’ve already customized for those flights might get overwritten. “Backup Mode” is self explanatory. Click Next. X out any flights you don’t want to import and make sure the “First Row Contains Field Names” is checked. Click Next again. The import columns you want in your logbook should be checked after mapping the import column to a logbook column in the last row where it says “Import Destination”. I recommend saving a template with these options so you don’t have to configure it every time. Otherwise it is almost more work than doing your logbook yourself. Blastro doesn’t log things like Landings, Day/Night Approaches or PIC since it really can’t rely on schedule data to be accurate for that. But the info it gets you started with like duration, dates, airport codes and crew member names saves a lot of work later.