This was one of our biggest obstacles when we started hiring. PBS came on property in 08 with a massive training flood to bring all pilots up to speed. When we furloughed with the bankruptcy all those plots that came back in 2012 and such went through the PBS training initially and just needed refreshers. It wasn’t until we did off the street in 2013? That we (alpa scheduling) released we had a problem.

PBS training from day 1 in 08 was turned over to the union by the company. There’s no one in the company proper that really knows how the pilot bidding side of the software works or how to really teach it. That meant it has, does, and always will fall to us to teach it to the new hires. We have an extensive document set that we’ve collected from 08 forward on the pbs training site (PBS Training / Review) to help and I wrote a good 4 page document that gets put into the new hire info packets. But I can’t make anyone read either of these items.

Now to the root of the question. We don’t really have the manpower or budget to go into a new hire class every 2 weeks to teach PBS. Even if we did, you can’t access the software until after you finish IOE and your much more worried about what hydraulic system 1 vs 2 does then how to bid for March 4th off. However class is the only place you are in mass, because after class everyone scatters to sim and IOE all over the world. This led to the solution we do now, base visits.

But to be totally honest even that’s not working right. In 08 with mock bids we had upwards of 4-5 trainers in each base every day during the training. Average time spent teaching a pilot was over an hour and a half of an initial walkthrough. Nowadays, I’m the only one in the base and I have maybe 15 minutes to work with a pilot or a group of pilots when I have a line 3-4 deep. What I’ve taken to doing it helping setup a PROPER default bid that shows the right and wrong way to bid and to discuss the general dynamics of PBS and then tell you to go off and read the training material and work on the system yourself. The manual and documents make much more sense when you have a properly entered bid vs a blank screen.

What I have run up against in the last year or so is this process has turned me more into pilot central bidding. I receive quite a few emails every month from pilots I setup bids for asking me to make this modification or that modification. I do this because I refuse to screw over someone asking for help but at the end of the day I’m doing the pilot a disservice doing this and the pilot themselves is doing a disservice by not bothering to dig into the software and really figure out how to do it themselves.

PBS is a complicated piece of software, but so is the airplane you are flying. At the end of the day you put a lot of time, effort and study time into learning the ins and outs of your airplane. Your monthly schedule is just as important, if not more so, to most of you. I continue to be shocked at the lack of time, effort and study time being put into learning the software. And I’m not just talking about new hire pilots either.

I think I’ve left topic enough and ranted enough. Time to move on.