Originally Posted by mike sierra

Currently issues at PSA:

Reserve sucks
Company does not negotiate in good faith
LOA have gray areas that company uses in their favor all the time
Union not communicating.
Trip pairing and line sucks because we don't have any protection for that

Things that are great at PSA:
SAP
Flow (If it still true)

Possible Solutions:
Change in the Union office

Both the union/pilot group/company work together in the agreements and ALL parties demonstrate they are willing to negotiate in good faith.

If we get a PBS system, we NEED to have an option to go back to the past system of line bidding and SAP, otherwise it will be impossible for the pilot group to believe both the union and management that they are negotiating in good faith because of past practice.

Moreover, it's possible to still have SAP after PBS. My suggestion would be something like this, what I believe it's a good compromise from both parties

Straight drop button for green days
grid needs to be green 75% of the days, including two weekends.
4 golden drop days per year (can drop on red without any constrain but holidays....company might be able to block a few holidays)
Holiday pay of 200% for everyone including reserve.
Duty rigs and trip rigs
Min Day 4 hours, despite show and release time.
100% deadhead pay
Aggressive pickup on reserve.
12 days off on reserve.

If that doesn't work, pilots can vote back to older system after a while.


This is something I would support and believe it would be a win-win for the pilots and company, however I don't believe it will be possible to see this coming true anytime soon because it's clear some part don't wanna negotiate in good faith or compromise a little bit to have a bigger win.

My advice:

VOTE ON THE ELECTION, GET PEOPLE THAT ARE TRYING TO DO SOMETHING IN THE OFFICE.

Originally Posted by ZeroTT

PBS does, in fact, make the system magically more efficient.

you are correct it doesn’t make pairings better per se, but it keeps them from getting broken up by training and vacation as currently happens resulting in all the trash that we see.

Originally Posted by SFDRVR1220

PBS does not magically make pairings more efficient. The efficiency of the flying that we do is dependent on what we get from American that month. Planning (and our ALPA guys now) plug all of that into the pairing generator and it spits out the pairings. PBS assigns those pairings in a way that will hopefully fit your preferences and shape itself around training and vacation.

The current system we have now, line bidding, takes those sweet 11 hour 4-days and stacks them into a month. You're then awarded that line of flying. If you have training, vacation, or anything else falling in during trip, then that trip then gets replaced by whatever TRN, VAC, etc, you've got and put in the OT pot.

Also, your premise makes zero sense. Lets say that PBS magically made pairings more efficient. Now instead of two 11 hour 4-days you've got one 22 hour 4-day. You'd only need one crew instead of 2. I don't understand how you've come to your conclusion that we would "build more lines." This isn't even possible with PBS because the whole point of PBS is to not build lines, but rather assign pairings.

Originally Posted by Bampilot

Are you guys bringing some people out of furlough? I heard a magic number of 250.

Originally Posted by ZeroTT

Roughly 8% of the pilot group has training or vacation every week. That’s significant low hanging fruit to prevent breaking all those pairings up

Originally Posted by JayBee

Exactly.

They're going after trip touching mark my words. PBS is just the means to that end.

Originally Posted by Approach1260

I mean the majority of PSA has always been reserve who get nothing from SAP. I'd rather have something that benefits the whole pilot group a little bit, over something that really helps the top 20% or so of each seniority list.