Originally Posted by
rickair7777
No, erase that entire paradigm. You have Stockholm syndrome.
If it has to do a CN, it needs to TOTALLY re-adjust ALL junior schedules BEFORE assigning that CN to a senior pilot who bid those day(s) off.
Unless there are hard schedule conflicts (training, vacation) which limit the solution, NO senior person should EVER work on a day he requested off if someone junior has that day off. You are correct that x-mas is irrelevant, that's just the obvious example.
This is hypothetical to a typical large hub base. Understood that a small boutique base may not have enough pairings, or enough pairing diversity to accomplish this.
The only way to prevent unreasonable manipulation of schedules out of seniority is to allow NO manipulation out of seniority. Otherwise it's too complicated and the company will get away with murder.
Yes, you could do that. But that could mean a couple of things:
1. have drop more stuff into open time which is not gonna happen. This would be one of the key parameters to control (to your earlier point) - or
2. effectively abandon the pairing preferences and make days off absolute and with a hierarchy. So for example, you CN junior people over x-mas and senior people get x-mas off. But if you still allocate all the flying, senior people may still get CN'ed over another day off or get their P1 pairing pulled and replaced with a PN because that is the only PBS can cover all the flying (or give you enough credit or whatever other reason there is). as long as there is a mandate to cover all flying there is a good chance that you will get screwed somewhere. Today there is no direct way to tell PBS where you preferably get screwed if you get screwed.
Or think of it the other way. PBS looks down at all the day off requests. At some point it will need to ignore them and place flying on those days anyway. If you are at that mid-level seniority where you have requested three days off that PBS needs. But for some other legality, line build (max working days etc.) or other it can only assign you one CN - which one is it going to pick?