There are a lot of caveats to the FedEx vacation system depending on whether or not you're a line holder, a secondary line holder, or on reserve. My statement below is the general method as I don't want to bore you with every possible permutation!

To make it simple, the majority of pilots are line holders and any trips that their vacation touches are eliminated from their schedule. Our vacations can be slid by 5 days in either direction to cause trips to be eliminated--whatever credit hour value they are. If the vacation days don't kill enough trip credit hours because they only hit small trips, you can expand your vacation as many days as it takes to reach the credit hour of the vacation, and up to 12 hours over. So yes, there is a credit hour deduction which is based on 6 hours per day of vacation. But, with skillful use of your vacation and middling and higher seniority you can essentially take the majority of two months off with one week of vacation! This would suck up a huge amount of vacation credit hours, but there are provisions for cherry picking trips before our open time is released to make up the deficit.

This is the QOL issue that I mentioned earlier in this thread. I have a LOT of flexibility to make my schedule very, very nice and this is worth a lot to me. I can make my vacation take up nearly a whole month, or only kill a week or so if there is a trip out there that I want to fly outside of the days off I want.

(The FedEx system has a LOT of different trips available to bid: AM out and backs, PM out and backs, AM or PM overnights, 12 day around the world trips, 7 day trips to India and back, single departure line months, week on/week off, and more and more. I love this about FedEx as there is almost something for everyone!)

Now, a possible example of an upper 20% seniority international pilot plan: my 7 days of vacation the last week of September is worth 42 credit hours. I can slide this vacation into October by two days while bidding for September. Let's say I bid and get awarded a single departure trip that's worth 78 credit hours that operates the last 13 days of September. That trip is killed with vacation, even though my vacation was worth only 42 credit hours. When the October bid month comes around, I can bid another single departure line that starts in the first few days of October and kill that month's trip for, let's say, another 78 credit hours. I've now spent 156 credit hours on a 42 credit hour vacation so I'm 114 hours in vacation deficit. But, I get paid for the full 156 credit hours I killed with the vacation. I now see a primo double deadhead international trip that someone else has dropped for vacation in October that I wasn't senior enough to hold on the original bid. I now stand a very good chance of picking up that 60 credit hour trip in late October to reduce my vacation deficit. Essentially, vacation deficit gives one super seniority in what we call the Monthly Bid Period Process that takes place after lines are first awarded--it's an adjustment period.

Not everyone is an upper 20% international guy. But, there are other vacation strategies that get one up to a month off too. Even reserve pilots can get nearly a month off with a week of vacation! If we got PBS, it would completely kill this--your vacation week would be it and PBS would fill in trips around those days off.

At the end of the year, if you're in vacation deficit, it rolls into the next year. Many pilots shoot for this as they keep bidding with super-seniority for each and every vacation month until they retire. For those pilots who are interested in the vacation days to be paid out and still work the majority of their schedule so they maximize pay, they can have a positive vacation bank balance at the end of the year and get paid out for it. This pay out is limited to a maximum of 60% of the vacation hours they had for the year, so you definitely want to use at least 40% of your vacation every year.

Many pilots take so much time off it's actually a very common statement in the international world of the 777 and MD-11 pilots at FedEx to hear one or both pilots say that they've had about 2 months off when they step out to the jets.

Sorry if this post was a run-on, but we have a lot of great things in our contract that positively affect our time off and quality of life, while at the same time having very decent hourly rates and a pension.

I'm not in any way trying to spout off about this, as I said on my first post on this thread, I didn't want to troll. So, please forgive me if anyone takes this the wrong way. I'm just trying to explain that while the pay value of the vacation might not be huge, what one can do with vacation is incredible--and the majority of pilots can do this 3-4 times a year...long time pilots up to 5 times a year.