Originally Posted by
Columbia
You mentioned a few pages ago that one great contract item to grab is vacation touching any trip causes the trip to disappear. That sound nice, but is there any way it could be implemented with PBS? It's obviously easy with traditional line bidding-find a line that matches up with your vacation and wala, 3 days off, 4 day trip, 7 day vacation, 4 day trip, 3 days off turns into 20 days in a row-OFF.
Just thinking out loud. Thx.
It could be implemented with PBS. PBS would simply disregard your vacation and award the trips you bid. The trips touching vacation would then be dropped and returned to the pot to be available for the next pilot to bid.
The problem is the nature of the system we run has changed from the touching trips days. Back then for the most part the longest trip we had was 4 days long. Now we have 13 day trips. A week of vacation would be a month off for most pilots. Even with just 6 day trips a pilot would make sure to touch two of them.
The solution to restore both the jobs lost and the vacation value is simple. We up the daily value of the vacation and make vacation pay and credit so a pilot actually has to take the time off. It would require a large increase in manning. If we went to 5 hours per day of vacation and it was pay and credit the company would have to increase manning by 1000 pilots with the majority of the jobs being Captains positions.