PBS gets a very bad rap due to poorly negotiated rules governing said system. We DO have PBS at purple and it sucks. In my view our secondary line bidding process needs to adopt many improvements.
-Transparency. We need access to the record generated by the award engine as it chugs through the pairings. We should be able to see who got a pairing ahead of us, why an available pairing was not awarded, and the order in which pairings were considered.
-ability to knock out trips with vacation with similar results to line holders.
-a round or two of practice awards to catch bidding errors and provide a degree of predictability to the process.
-logic to control the amount we fly. We all don’t want to fly the same company generated average. There should be a credit window that allows for low and high credit line construction.
-bid sheet logic to allow for “if not this than this” arguments. As it stands now it’s just a wishlist that tends to be all or nothing IMHO.
To be clear I am not advocating PBS to replace our line bidding process. All of the above features and more were available to ASA pilots, so it can be done and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
In the end I fear none of this will happen as the company has little interest in improving our “PBS” and so much of negotiation is a zero sum game...