Sprinkle them wisely, and bid reserve. You will never work and make lots more money.

Terrible advice here from T.

More than likely a person with a lot of payback days is an F/O the 7ER or smaller because the people who earned a lot of PB days in the past year were F/Os on the 717, 88, and 320.

Therefore, these people are now either still on narrowbodies or are the plug on the 330/765 at best.

Therefore, they are still on fleets that will result in working almost every single reserve day.

The best use of PB days is to bid a line and drop workdays worth 6-7 hours.

Bid a 25hr 4-day trip and only burn 4 PB days to drop it with pay.

To accomplish the same net time off result on reserve would eat up PB days much faster.

Pretty sure he could drop it again with more PB days.

Yes. In a perfect world. But if we have inadequate reserve coverage (OCT NYC 717A for example) the PB days are next to worthless.

There's always NOV, I suppose.

But what I'm saying is, if you have adequate coverage to drop, then you're better off dropping a nice fat 4-5 day trip. It's worth so much more when PB days don't have a max drop value attached to them.

No coverage, then you're stuck with a reserve line and have to fly all of it, which is why I would never advise that strategy unless it is abundantly obvious that coverage will be blue.

You can drop one third of a month's work with 4 PB days in a good lineholder scenario.

A reserve line would never allow such a thing.

You have until the end of March 2017 to use any PB days earned in 2016. 2016 PB days will be bid as "supplemental" days with your 2017 vacation. But you can use them January to March. Just PD (or APD) a trip. Then call CS and tell them you want to use your PB days to cover the trip drop.

As a side note, January to end of March is the only time you can use PB days to cover an APD.

Denny

No doubt using them to drop a trip as a lineholder is far superior to using them on a RES day. I'm simply making an observation that, in either case, there has to be adequate reserves -- which is beyond our control.

Both these responses are correct, it just depends on staffing.

If there are a few blue days in strategically good spots then JB is correct. You can break the sequencing rules in PBS when you use a PD or PB day which makes you just about unusable to scheduling. If you have 4 days on in a row, put a PB day in the middle and now the company can only give you a 1 or 2 day trip at very specific times. You really can't make much more money unless you happen to GS over the PB days. Yes, the value of a PB day over reserve is greater than vacation but unless you GS you don't make more money, you just work less for the same money.

If it's blue days for all my friends then Contrails is correct. Ideally you drop high value trips and GS over the top of them. If that doesn't work, find a high avg daily value trip and drop/pick it back up until you hit the pickup limit. This can work for senior pilots, but from what I've seen junior pilots have very little chance of securing the bang-for-the-buck trips.

My observation is if you're in a category where you can earn PB days you're probably in a category where it will be hard to use them. I was hoping that by switching categories I'd be able to put them to good use (I didn't swap for this reason, it was just a happy coincidence). Here's another tidbit, the scheduling reference handbook says you have to use the PB days by 1 Jan or they become supplemental vacation. That's not true. Between 1 Jan and 31 March you can use a PD and then call CS to put PB days on top of the PD and get paid for the trip/reserve days.

are you saying you can use PB days to drop a trip, then WS it and you get 2x pay for it?

If you stay under the pickup limit that is exactly what I am saying. You could hypothetically drop/pick-up the same 1 day 8:55 block trip multiple times until you hit the pickup limit. Because of column limitations you'd have to call CS and have them "move" the trip from day to day on your time card but I've been told it can be done.