Hello all,

I’ve been reading many posts for a while but I finally got the urge to post. I heard that SAP may be going away from one of the line pilots, and it is one of the biggest reasons I am considering PSA over PDT. Can anyone chime in?

The union lately has taken a moderated stance on the subject. They say it's not, and a PBS system wouldn't replace it. One thing some of them seem to be sure about is that if it were to be modified, that it would take Endeavor money and Envoy flow.

We can all dream......

SAP is not going away.

I don’t know. Yesterday I was pretty confident I’d never have to work with a leprechaun, but I’ve recently discovered I was in error.

I don’t have anything against leprechauns in general, in case any of you are one.

The union has told us sap will not be going away, but how sap will function with pbs is yet to be determined, and pbs is coming our way weather we like it or not as the pilot group will not get a say in the matter. The other benefits of sap was that it had very few limitations. The big one being that you could take holiday's off with sap, which to the detriment of the company they were forced to pay incentive pay on holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving. I have a feeling that saping the holidays off will be severely limited or restricted. If you are coming here strictly because we have sap, I would urge caution.

Though I think we will still have the best SAP out of any regionals with SAP.

^ Truth. I've got a couple friends at Republic telling me how disappointed they were with their SAP. They thought it was going to function like ours. They have PBS + SAP and being able to drop for them depends on their reserve availability. Ours is truly unrestricted except for obvious ones like 117, training qualification, medical, etc...

SAP, as we know it is going away.

Don't know why but that statement of fact gets people's panties in a bunch...

Are we supposed to have a SAP with PBS ? Yes. Does anyone know what that means ? No. (unless they a super secret access badge in which case they can't/won't talk about it...)

So yea, we will get a sales pitch along the lines of "you won't need to SAP because PBS will give you what you want...". As I understand it, with no official word from our Union, the pairings do not change. PBS doesn't fix anything, it is just a different bidding system.

We already have the ability to sort lines based on our preference and once the computer sorts them we can manually select or deselect in our order of preference because the sort doesn't give you exactly what you want.

With PBS, the computer will sort it and autoselect it for us. If you don't get it right people will say "you got to learn how to use it better" as if you were stupid, just fell off the turnip truck and this was your first day on the job. The fact of the matter is PBS has this feature called "unstacking" where it will force stuff on you. A lot of it depends on the contract language with how well PBS will or will not work for us.

I'll reserve judgement until I actually see it but based on the very poor language of our current contract and LoA's with "unintended consequences" I do not have my hopes very high. I hope that I am completely wrong but I am not holding my breath.

hmmm... isn't that the job of the union?

Let's not get alarmist. PBS would require a MAJOR revision of the contract. The pilot group has to get a say in the matter.

It's not a "little" change that can be addressed in an LOA...