Some good questions being asked on vacation time. Can someone give us new hires a run-down on how much vacation time is accrued and how it works for the first year or two? I just spent 25 mins searching and it didn’t produce an informative picture. Thanks!

unless you get approved for a vacation drop, no.

PBS will fill in trips or reserve around your vacation to make sure you don’t get any usable chunks of time off.

If true, are you just getting paid for extra hours that month but not actually getting any extra time off?

You might get a few extra days off, but yeah vacation at SkyWest is really just extra pay unless you're a lifer with a ton of vacation time and the seniority to gobble up all the weeks before the junior guys get them. This is part of why PBS is so terrible.

There are two different types of accrued time off awarded. User time and Vacation time.. Each is based upon a formula in the PPM. User time is basically sick time that is there for when you are unfit to fly, either because you are sick (Sick time) or because a family emergency of some type came up.(EMER time) What constitutes an emergency is very vague, but your car broke down on the way to work, your significant other is sick and needs you to take care of them, your child needs to go to the hospital, you missed your commute, your house pipes burst and you need to clean up, ETC. when you call into crew scheduling or electronically call off are trip you indicate whether it Sick or Emergency. By the PPM EMER can officially only be approved by your Chief pilot, but a simple phone call, email or text to him/her explaining what the emergency was is usually more than sufficient. If you are on reserve and know you won't be able to work if called you are supposed to call in sick before your on call shift starts,
This User time is used to cover the hours you are supposed to work and will be docked from your USER Bank. If you don't have enough hours in that bank to cover your scheduled credit, your monthly credit will be decreased, so your pay will go down.
Vacation time accrues at a formula based on the number of hours you credit. That formula is somewhere in the PPM under compensation, but as a new hire it is not much at all. Search the PPM for Accrual. It does build up in the first year, but you can't actually take vacation in that first year. As an FO those hours build up and pay at the pay rate you are when you actually use them. so it behooves you to not use User or vacation hours earned as an FO until you are a Captain when you then get paid captain rates. Earn at FO Rates, pay at captain rates.
Once you hit one year at the company you can BID for vacation, but probably not actually GET vacation. You bid for full weeks off which are awarded by seniority, then after the award you can reduce or maybe even pick up a couple days that are available when someone else turns back in days they didn't actually need, but were awarded because of how our system works. Awarded vacation (yeah riiiiigght) preassigns those days off at the number of hours per day you request, then PBS builds the rest of your schedule up to the number of hours required per month. You can choose anywhere from 2.5 hours per day to 5(?) and that rate must be specified by the fifth (?) of the month prior so PBS knows how many hours you need to be awarded to get a full schedule.

lower left corner of your paystub will show how many hours user or vacation time you have earned that pay period and how big your bank is. as a new hire it's probably about 1-2 hour per pay period for each type of time, while vacation time increases to maybe 3-4 hours per pay period as a much more senior pilot.

Easy enough run down?

new hire timeline
 

H All,
thanks for answring my questoins earlier. Update:

Interview was on 12/21 in the morning.
CJO afternoon of the 23rd. (nice early Christmas present)
Picked the ERJ (she said no we don't have any A-10s, try again)
ATP-CTP 6/7/22
Class date 6/21/22
On the waitlist to go early.

Thanks for taking the time to write out all the details. I really appreciate it. It all makes sense and I understand now.

Is there a way for those of us awaiting our class date to access a PPM so we can start reading up and self-answering some of our questions? I know new revisions can come out, but the vast majority of policies and procedures will likely stay the same over the next few months, so it's not like trying to learn call-outs or systems training.

If you have full access to SWOL you can access it, otherwise no.

Thanks. I am in SWOL, but just with cadet access (which isn’t much). As others have mentioned, I should get full access to SWOL approximately 90 days out from class.

Anyone have an estimate of how much training pay was by the time it was all said and done and hit your bank account (after taxes). I know everyone's situation is a bit different in regards to taxes but just curious