With the new payscale, that is what they are encouraging. There is no longer a pay bump if you upgrade to CA in the first year. The downside is that may cause the the DRL upgades to extend out longer (my guess is over 2 years).

As someone said in another thread, the people looking at ILC candidates will wonder why you sat as a SIC on the Phenom rather than upgrade. So, that may flush people out of the seat.

What and when people bid for is always changing and you just have to do what makes you happy.

If you want ILC (or to build time for the airlines), your best bet will be to upgrade ASAP and get TPIC time. If you are happy being a DRL CA, your best bet would be to wait and NOT upgrade to the Phenom.

new developments?
 

Things have been quiet lately in this forum. Any improvements on PBS lately, or at least interest by management in fixing it? During my interview they didn't discuss any growing pains or initiatives to improve PBS, but that was a sales pitch so I didn't expect any admissions like "it's super unpopular and we're working on it."

My going-in plan is to do 8/6 for my first 6 months, both to try out the fixed-schedule lifestyle and because I wouldn't have the seniority to hold anything decent in PBS anyway. I've got time to wait it out--following this plan, it'd be 1Q2025 before I tried PBS--but I'm bored and curious (admittedly a dangerous combination). :D

I think that is the correct plan. Bidding seems to have gotten better but I also havent requested specific days off in the last few bid periods so I cant judge (that to me is where the issue was). It sucks to ask for days off, still be willing to fly max days WITH those days off (if they would award them) and yet be schedule for those days so you burn PTO....It seems like such a simple fix but management has not really seemed to admit there was a problem yet.

I'm on the other end of the airline pipeline. I'll be good with DRL CA.

New hire still in training here. What would happen if you input preferences and want to work 16 days per month but the system assigns you 18 or 20 days? Is there any recourse to get a few days removed or are you stuck with what the system assigns? That could be a major issue with QOL if you get many more days assigned than desired.

I believe the system will only assign a max of 16 days per 28 day bid period and there are 13 bids periods. So thats about 17.33 days per month avg. But, no, once they schedule you the only way to get less days is burn PTO on the front end of a tour. Hope that helps.

I was wondering how PTO intreracted with the schedule. So if you can bid for and get non-working days, great, and if they schedule you to work on day(s) you want off, you can trump them by using PTO on the affected days? That must create quite the puzzle for the schedulers to work out.

Thank you for the response. If you could estimate, how many pilots are using Flexbid vs. going with the fixed 8/6 schedule? In training we were advised to pick flex bid first, try it for a few months, and then switch to the fixed schedule if so inclined.