PBS gains it's efficiencies by how it works.

If you are Joe-bag-o-donuts pilot, you learn to work the system. With a LOT system of bidding with "touching trips", it's fairly easy to cause a trip stack.

Unless there is some kind of system schedule change, the flying over the end of the month is nothing special. Same as the middle of the month.

BUT, that's not how bidding works. When you bid a LOT, you want to maximize pay, and minimize work (duh). If you can cause a conflict that's pay protected, that's what you do, and those month to month transition trips fall out and stack up.

With a LOT system, there is no provision for "unstacking", and those trips pile up in the "unassigned pile" UNABLE to be assigned to line holders. That means they are going to reserves. While you may have enough reserves for the rest of the month, that same coverage will be inadequate over the transition days, requiring staffing to match. That means you carry reserves that are "excess" the rest of the month.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, with the various kinds of absences: Military, vacation, training, etc. If you have a trip that touches a vacation day or a training day, that whole trip falls out during the bidding process, and goes into the "open stack". With this kind of time, it's more evenly distributed throughout the month, but it is still open time. You can use a bit of historical data to figure out what will get picked up, but you still need to make sure you have the reserve staffing to cover the excess.

It's very much like a jigsaw puzzle. When you do your first pass, you get the easy pieces to fit together, but you have a lot of pieces left over. PBS is VERY good at getting the pieces to fit together so that you have very few left over. PBS will NEVER award a conflict. EVER (unless something changes after the run starts).

Now what Sailing said was true...kinda (like a lot of things he posts). There is within PBS, essentially, a "parameter file" (at least at NWA). Beyond the PWA and FAR rule set, the parameter file essentially tells PBS how hard to work to make things fit, and much "open time" to leave at the end of the run.

Those numbers can adversely affect "bid quality" to a surprising extent. If you force the system to produce zero (or near zero) open time, then the quality REALLY stinks, because the system really needs some "float" to operate correctly. This is why any group who tries it (and has a NC worth their salt) includes a "kill switch" that allows them to unilaterally go back to LOT bidding. Faced with the prospect of giving up the productivity gains of PBS, most companies will at least attempt to play fair and keep the numbers "honest".

This is why you will get multiple runs of categories on occasion.

Make no mistake. PBS is "shiny". The same mechanism that allows the productivity gains permits high to very high "bid satisfaction" pretty far down the category list. It does this because everyone's desires are slightly different. It shakes the puzzle box to evenly distribute pieces.

This is very similar to the pay banding issue. Get better schedules (which affect me now) in exchange for fewer pilots required (may affect me later, or not at all if I'm senior). With Pay Banding...get more pay (which affects me now) in exchange for fewer pilots required (may affect me later, or not at all if I'm senior). Of course, the people who are in the percentage band that gets "optimized" don't fare so well.

The only question is if you decide to go down that road, how much do you charge for the "exchange" of pay for jobs, and what, if any, safeguards to put in place.

Nu