Great post, UA. I agree 100%.

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...

Communism would work well too....if only the right people were in charge.... :rolleyes:

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....:rolleyes:)
• 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.

Can someone share the junior to senior base rankings? More importantly how long will it take to hold lax? Thanks.

Can someone explain what PBS is and how it works, or link to an article that discusses it? When I google it, all that comes up is the television network.

12 years currently

And yet we have a group of college educated pilots who make up our MEC who don’t seem to get it. This all began as a project to sweeten the pot for our senior pilots who won’t be around for the next contract. Now, it has gained a life of its own and they must keep it going to justify the time and money they have sunk into it.

If you have already maxed out your A Plan benefit, no problem. If not, we are just going to freeze that 2.5 million benefit you talked about (that is also GUARANTEED), in exchange for a Plan where the pilot basically bears all of the risk.

Not so fast.

Remember, the whole point of PBS from The Company's perspective is to increase productivity and thereby reduce manning, i.e. costs.

When manning is decreased because PBS makes us more efficient, there won't be sufficient reserves to cover drops. You'll own the trips you're awarded, no drops, no trades, no changes. PBS has often been compared to our Secondary Line construction. It's actually much worse. With PBS you'll get your trips and you'll like them, period. :o






.

I come from a carrier that had PBS, and can’t stress enough how BAD PBS is from pilot stand point. It would be detrimental to our quality of life here at FedEx! It is only a tool for management to increase utilization.

PBS is so wrong in so many ways as you described in your post, plus many other reasons. It’s bad when even the #1 pilot on the seniority list can’t hold their first choice, due to pilots junior to them only being able to hold the trips the #1 pilot wants, because of vacation and training. I know it’s hard to understand, but the computer doesn’t care about your seniority if the trip you want will only fit in a junior pilots schedule. It negates any seniority to fill everyone’s schedule as efficiently as possible.

The PBS system is just a computer algorithm that tries to fill the seats. The system is programmed by the company for the company. No matter any transparency, or control you think you might have, the company pays for and will run the program. Transparency only allows you to see how bad you are getting screwed, and just makes you more frustrated.

There is a huge learning curve on how to use PBS and many months to years of bad bidding going on before you even start to scratch the surface of all the “options” that you can ask for. You can very easily screw yourself.

I was SO happy to come to a carrier that didn’t have PBS.
I implore all FedEx pilots to say NO! to PBS!