Actually, the best thing the company could do would be to make our secondary bidding system as good and pilot friendly as possible. We're not negotiating and the improvement process is supposed to be happening (well, should have happened quite a while ago). So, the ball's in their court and there's no zero sum involved.

They could make it the most kick-ass PBS anyone has ever seen and hope that people start warming up to it. In the meantime, at least we'll have a better secondary process. Or they could put a little lipstick on the pig we have and pretty much guarantee we'll never see it here.

Regardless of how great guys coming from former PBS companies insist it can be, there are still a bunch of reason why it's a terrible idea.

• It's a huge manpower win for the company, so less pilots
• With that efficiency will come less trips in open time, less trading options. (of course the counter to that is "everyone gets what they want, so no need to trade....)
• Less pilots and less open trips = less reserves required - Local MEM guys can say "buh bye" to spending a month on reserve and getting used for one trip
• PBS will deny all the junior folks the current avenues they have to get better trips (Trip and training conflicts, min days off, OTP, VMU, BLAs)

If you don't think we would get completely SMOKED by the company negotiating the PBS programming rules, you probably just haven't been here long enough. Maybe they fixed it by now, but when United went to PBS every month there was so much flying left by the time the top half of the list built their moderate schedules that the bottom half had to be maxed out just to cover it.