How does vacation work
 

I have been working as an A&P for 11 year and am making the transition to hopefully fly for PSA soon but have no airline flying experience. How does vacation time work at PSA? The part that is confusing to me is you don't know a year from now what days you are working so how do you know what days to take off. I know I'm coming at this from a standers 9-5 mentality I just cant wrap my mind around pilot how vacation time works for pilots.

You bid for a guaranteed week off. Your actual days off will depend on the actual flying you are awarded for the month of your vacation, but will definitely include the awarded vacation days.

For example: If I had next week off, it would be Sunday June 30th through Saturday July 6th. I was awarded a trip from July 1st through the 4th. My vacation would replace that trip from my schedule and I would be paid 21 hours instead of the original trip credit. I already had the 29th of June off and I SAPed out of a July 8th trip, therefore, I would have made myself a 16 day "week" of vacation. Of course, I would only earn 21 hours of credit during that time and have needed at least 44 hours of credit (maybe 47) later in July to allow me to SAP away the trip on the 8th.

When you have trips that run into or out of the vacation week they are handled in a a variety of ways by the planning department. They must get you in domicile by 5pm(?) the day before your vacation begins and they can't have you start earlier than 10am(?) the day after your vacation ends (I'm too lazy to confirm those times in the contract), so, they will either modify your awarded trips that encroach on your vacation or drop them completely.

Not sure if that helps much, but that's how things work, for now. If we go to PBS all that will change.

Thanks, the time off part makes sense. How does the pay side of it all work. Does my vacation time count as any flight time credit?

If I took one week off, but in that month I still flew 75 hrs. would I just make the guaranteed pay or would I get paid something for my vacation time on top of the guaranteed min?

You get paid 21 hours for vacation. In a (very busy!!) month that had a week of vacation and 75 hours flight credit, you'd earn 96 hours.