Originally Posted by
FLYBOYMATTHEW
The biggie of course is elimination of transition conflicts, which in turn reduces the need for the high number of reserves to cover all the dropped trips at the beginning and end of the month. Another would be trip touching on vacation weeks. You'll get your bid weeks off, but you'll block more now in those months to make up for it. Vacation will get bookended with trips, so the days of getting 2 weeks off using 18 hours of vacation are gone when PBS is implemented. Training drops? Probably won't happen. You'll just be taken down to min days off in training months and flying will be built around your sim or groundschool. In general, soft time will be greatly reduced, so you make more per hour, but you'll likely have more block hours on your schedule than under the old contract. Crew utilization goes up, required staffing goes down. I just hope it doesn't get to the point that it's tough to drop a 4-day here and there.
This may be aside your point, and I assume you were framing a hypothetical here so I will cut you some slack, but your example here kind of distorts the truth. Wiping out 2 weeks with only 18 hours of vacation time would be possible but atypical. 18 hours would be typically be a weak 4 day or a fair 3 day pairing, so 2 weeks would probably come at a cost of 30 to 40 hours from your sick bank.