lowflying

If you're a no vote its I June .

....it should be opening soon. It will be electronic so everyone needs to make sure they're getting emails. If not ask somebody who is to help you out.

word302

Good luck guys. Sounds like a tough choice.

lowflying

Anything over 76 seats will be negotiated now. Regardless 100 seats aren't likely anytime soon...

phalanxo

We have it in the compass SEA base, with 44 pilots. Works just fine as the company wants - assigns all the flying, leaves zero open time and tons of reserves. Want a day off? "Company need, here's an unproductive trip." In our SAP/SCP there's never really anything left to swap/trade out, either. PBS is a huge concession as is, would really love to see what 'ironclad rules' the company won't be able to get around to do what they want.
I don't have a dog in your fight but have a lot of Seattle friends at QX I want to see protected. Given how hard it is to find pilots these days I think it's insane to take any concessions when the company is making so much $. It's not easy to find pilots these days.

Phteven

I don't see how PBS inherently has the capacity to be good for us, even with DELTA quality work rules, as we have been hearing so much lately. With tons of pilots in a base and a variety of decent high credit trip options, I can see how PBS might be okay. But our wants at the small base regional level are a little simpler, which just means a handful will get what they want and the rest will get the scraps.

I thought AAG was mismanaging the execution of these negotiations, but I guess I was wrong. I just underestimated the weakness of this pilot group.

Phteven

Our contract says they have to leave 3% of the flying in open time (with an option for 1.5% twice annually). Do you think seeding that many trips would make a difference in your experience? Also I'm not sure if that is global or per base, which if global would probably **** all the outstation bases.

phalanxo

That's a good question... here's the problem if they did that at Compass.. you end up in seattle (44 FOs) with 4-9 guys with 20-60 hr buildup lines. They all try to complete to 75 hrs to avoid any reserve days, usually out of crappy CDOs left over after the bid is run. If 3% was left, and included then in the SCP (schedule completion) or SAP (schedule adjustment), they would try to pick those all up subject to seniority. Otherwise anything left over is gonna get picked up at midnight or noon or whatever time they actually allow open time to get freely picked up so they can avoid reserve days. Not sure if it works differently there, I'm sure it does but something to keep in mind when you switch. 3% doesn't sound like a lot, sounds like just CDOs could cover that contractual clause. PBS is not designed to leave open trips/open flying.. it is designed to try to cover all the flying to the best of it's ability (which is why we end up with 20 hr buildup lines). Also keep in mind that the company is going to construct trips to whatever the current contract is. That's one area where we got burned, when switching from a 4.75 average daily trip guarantee to a 4 hr min day. Pilots were looking at current trips and trying to project what they'd get under the 4 hr min day, but when the rule changed, so did the way they built trips... (we also didn't foresee the use of a loophole/contract language to get out of paying us for our 24 hrs in fairbanks, thus our fairbanks 8 hr 3 days which would have been better under the average daily trip guarantee since the 4 hr min day spuriously doesn't apply, a subject of current grievance between the company and union). Just keep that in mind...
Another thing to consider is the way vacation is handled within PBS... at least in ours, we get 3.25 hrs credit for each vacation day. In ours, the vacation days are preloaded into PBS and it won't award you anything to avoid conflicts (same with training)... you actually tend to end up with a pretty bad schedule as the 3.25 hrs a day isn't that much and now there are a ton of pairings/trips that fall over your vacation period that you can't get, so PBS has many fewer legal pairings it can assign to you to build you to your hours. As I understand it with line building anything touching your vacation or training gets dropped leading to great schedules for those months... that flips around with PBS.

lowflying

Wow thanks for the detailed write up. Our 3/1.5% numbers are max open time. We also have specific restrictions on the company setting average line value too high. Do you know what yours is set at?

phalanxo

In our case they don't set the average line value, they set the min value or "Raise the floor" to 85. You can configure PBS to award you 75-95 hrs and if they do nothing, the floor is 75 (as that is our guarantee for a 30/31 day bid period).. But they usually raise the floor to 85. That said, by the time PBS gets to you, it will assign you a 'line value' in order to cover flying in some cases. In a month with a 75 floor our PBS system still decided I should be at 84.7 hours or something and kept filling me up til I got there. Our vendor is AOS PBS, Skywest uses them as well. Most certainly NOT the vendor you want to go with... this is supposedly the one US airways uses as well.. Current Client/Customer Links they also name Alaska as a client? I thought alaska did line bidding...

TheTransporter

FAs................