Originally Posted by phalanxo

That's a good question... here's the problem if they did that at Compass.. you end up in seattle (44 FOs) with 4-9 guys with 20-60 hr buildup lines. They all try to complete to 75 hrs to avoid any reserve days, usually out of crappy CDOs left over after the bid is run. If 3% was left, and included then in the SCP (schedule completion) or SAP (schedule adjustment), they would try to pick those all up subject to seniority. Otherwise anything left over is gonna get picked up at midnight or noon or whatever time they actually allow open time to get freely picked up so they can avoid reserve days. Not sure if it works differently there, I'm sure it does but something to keep in mind when you switch. 3% doesn't sound like a lot, sounds like just CDOs could cover that contractual clause. PBS is not designed to leave open trips/open flying.. it is designed to try to cover all the flying to the best of it's ability (which is why we end up with 20 hr buildup lines). Also keep in mind that the company is going to construct trips to whatever the current contract is. That's one area where we got burned, when switching from a 4.75 average daily trip guarantee to a 4 hr min day. Pilots were looking at current trips and trying to project what they'd get under the 4 hr min day, but when the rule changed, so did the way they built trips... (we also didn't foresee the use of a loophole/contract language to get out of paying us for our 24 hrs in fairbanks, thus our fairbanks 8 hr 3 days which would have been better under the average daily trip guarantee since the 4 hr min day spuriously doesn't apply, a subject of current grievance between the company and union). Just keep that in mind...
Another thing to consider is the way vacation is handled within PBS... at least in ours, we get 3.25 hrs credit for each vacation day. In ours, the vacation days are preloaded into PBS and it won't award you anything to avoid conflicts (same with training)... you actually tend to end up with a pretty bad schedule as the 3.25 hrs a day isn't that much and now there are a ton of pairings/trips that fall over your vacation period that you can't get, so PBS has many fewer legal pairings it can assign to you to build you to your hours. As I understand it with line building anything touching your vacation or training gets dropped leading to great schedules for those months... that flips around with PBS.