For me, I'd never want to be at an airline while PBS is being instituted but I'd prefer to be at an airline that already has PBS because it is a preferable way to bid if done right.

Now I sat beside an Expressjet pilot one day and we compared our PBS systems. You guys are exactly right to be concerned about the quality of the PBS system you go with. If it is cheap, like expressjets seems to be, it will be miserable.

But of course that depends on what that transition would look like, do they all of a sudden become overstaffed because of PBS? Then no PBS.

If you want to see our PBS gouge it's open on the internet for viewing: http://www.pbshelp.info/delta/PBS_Gouge.pdf but I'll admit that is kind of a daunting thing to look at. Basically:

• When it comes to reserve you bid the days off you want in the order you want them and the computer tries to give you as many as it can in order left to right. If it can't give you what you want it takes away the last day and then retries.
  
  
• For lines there are so many ways you can attack it. I first say what days off I prefer and that becomes controlling as much as feasible. You could then say I want 4 days that xyz (which can be dozens of things in various combinations) on dates ### and so on. I do that but I generate what individual trips there are and then bid those trips specifically. And then I relax my constraints on the next line and so on. For Christmas I had about 6-10 Else Start Next bids, so my line bid group 1 had a few things that were a must else throw the bid away and go to group 2 which was slightly different and if you can't give me that toss the whole group out and go to 3, if not that, go to reserve but it must be these days off, if not that, go back to line holding but this time..., etc.
  
  
• I like that we can slide vacations, I had a mid November vacation and slid it back a couple of days over Thanksgiving and had the week off. The computer then built a line around that. Same with December, mid December vacation became Dec 25-31 and then it built the trips around that. Sliding vacation only happens if you could get those days off anyways, if you weren't senior enough to hold 26-28th off, then it won't slide over those days, but it might slide 19-25th. Not bad.
  
  
• So you do bid a plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D, etc. unless you are insanely senior in category. Even then I'd bid at least to plan c.

/Delta pilot commenting on the Alaska pilot only thread