Originally Posted by wanttofly

Sure, it sometimes happens. More often however, there will be an insufficient amount of trips to make a complete line, and a senior pilot without pre-assigned credits will be on reserve, while a junior pilot will have a line made up of the leftovers. I, for one, have never heard anyone gripe about that, mostly because it's a nice relief for the multi-year reserve pilots and everyone knows it.

Unfortunately, it's the dedication to seniority that exacerbates the problem. Since the PBS system builds lines in order, from senior to junior, it won't look at a preference until it starts to build that pilot's line. So if for instance, in this scenario, if a senior pilot has 2 trips that would fit his preferences, and only one of those would fit the junior pilot's schedule it is left up to chance to see who gets which trip. If the senior pilot is awarded the only trip that would fit the junior pilot's schedule, then the system will place the junior pilot on reserve. This, despite the fact that there could be a way to award both pilots a line that matches all of their preferences, satisfying both senior and junior pilots alike.

Also, I'm not sure how it "Directly violates seniority". In that scenario, the senior bidder had a larger pool of trips from which a line could be built, and was awarded their pre-assigned credits in seniority order. It seems to me like seniority was directly involved the entire time.