Dear Mr. Wingtips,

Me and my associates wish you a happy new year and thank you from the bottom of our hearts on becoming an airline pilot. We need more pilots like you in the industry willing to help us out by working much harder for far less and rallying for anything that increases profits and our compensation at your expense. Please tell all your similarly minded friends to become pilots too, as we can't continue to crush your profession without the sympathetically clueless.

Signed,

Airline management.

 

Clearly, you've never used PBS before. If you have any sort of pre-existing absence (vacay, training are loaded into your month before you log into the bidding website) you'd be better off bidding with darts and a dartboard.

Guess how many days off I got this summer when I had vacation? 16.

Guess how many days I got off this month with no vacation? 16. PBS takes vacation, and turns it into nothing more than 7 guaranteed days off. It does nothing to add to the amount of time you get off in a given month.

This is just one of the ways my QOL suffers due to PBS. My schedule goes to hell anytime I have recurrent as well. Any pre-existing absence makes it harder for the computer to build you a line (read: piece together a jigsaw puzzle of what you are legal for out of the remaining pairings when it reaches your seniority).

PBS is a serious concession. Don't ever let anyone tell you different. Anyone who does is stupid or senior. Guys like you and me are neither, and it doesn't benefit us in any way.

 

1+ Agree...

 

Well I haven't used it but I have friends who do and who are about the same seniority that I have here. They are consistently getting the days off that they want while I rarely get anything I want. Not arguing that it's better overall but it doesn't seem THAT bad.

 

Yep.........think of a "working day" as a deck chair. PBS just allows management to maintain a fixed number of deck chairs and reshuffle them as they see fit to benefit themselves. With hard schedules and many of the currently common contractual scheduling provisions, pilots can actually decrease the number of deck chairs.

But......well, pilots being as clueless as they frequently are will sometimes run straight at the fire instead of distance themselves from it.

 

What about what just wrote doesn't seem THAT bad?

Who do your friends work for?

I can tell you what kind of line the bottom line holders get at my airline: min days off, and coverage trips (read: trips that the PBS program decides you must fly, no matter how you bid). Every once in a while a weekday trip that pays 4 hours/day slips through the cracks, but most of us mid range seniority guys will fly those just to get these weekends off.

Please listen to me on this. PBS isn't something you want at the regional level. At a major, with the proper contract language, it COULD be acceptable. No regional is going to give the union the language you need to make your QOL decent. It will cost them too much, and they know that. You're dealing with a company that is in bankruptcy - do you really think their going to open their wallet now?

I've seen your lines - keep them, and cherish them.

 

Once you move up it gets a lot better. Being senior reserve has been better than having a line, in my opinion, as far as getting the days off I need. You can choose to fly or not and you have enough guys below you to cover getting called in.

 

PBS is the worse. I've used both, and PBS is simply garbage

 

That is always one of the rude awakenings for people who think PBS will be good. You can have a week of vacation and get 14 days off. Just because you ask PBS for something doesn't mean it will give it to you, and if your bid does not have what it wants to put on your schedule, then it creates what it wants (min days off, and low credit with 30 hr sits)

 

That's because you're late for swaps, TTOT. I almost always had what I asked.

Now I'm a bottom line holder so I have to get what I can and then trip trade. But as reserve I always was one of the first requesting swaps. If they deny those I keep sending request until they got tired of me and gave me what I wanted.