Originally Posted by
full of luv
For the most part, except that I think at SWA since everyone flies the same airplane with the same quals, I guess you have essentially the whole company to pick from in open time vs a company that has categories where the amount of open time will fluctuate depending on staffing, seasonal variations etc, and you have a specific pool of flying and pilots that you can swap/add/drop from.
The MAIN upside with PBS (what all the legacies use now except SWA/ALK) is that you get much more control on the initial building of your schedule so much less tailoring required from the get-go, but the corollary to that is much less flying gets dumped into open time due to the absence of trip dropping conflicts with vacation/training.
From comparing notes with my SWA golfing buddies, if your goal is to fly 1000 hours per year block time and maximize your credit each month, it's probably consistently easier at SWA to make that happen. If your goal is to drop trips here and there because your wife is a doctor and work is interfering with your hobbies, it's probably easier at a legacy. This would be over a career, as any given month at either company can have vastly different results depending on staffing and flying load.
This is wrong. Maybe it's true for for widebody guys, but I can guarantee I work less days and have the ability to drop more days of flying than any of my legacy buddies flying narrowbodies. And not to mention I credit may more than them per day of work.
But somehow I'm on track to only fly 650hrs this year even though I've had months that ranged from 90-143 tfps.
This month I was originally scheduled for 12 days of flying. Through some creativity I was able to drop 6 days of that flying. I then picked up an extra 3 day trip that I wanted to fly for a total of 11 days (two 4-days that are commutable on both ends and one 3-day that I can drive to work) and I will credit 93. That also includes a one day turn that I picked up out of my home commuter airport that paid 8 and was cancelled due to the hurricane. So I guess it's technically 12 days of work for 93 tfp's. It's also all weekday flying and I am a guy that just hit second year.
PBS blows and guys that think it's awesome don't know enough about line bidding or never figured out how to work the system with line bidding.