PBS is awesome if you know how to use it well. But yes, it's not the most user friendly up front. There is a learning curve to it for sure but it is incredibly powerful and flexible.

At 50% (assuming 50% of G-Line), you should be able to limit your flight hours using a SET command no problem. That said, the LCFs were high across the board for March so you're not going to get a line below that regardless.

The stuff I've seen from BidNav and ProBid or whatever is kind of a joke.

 

Contractual improvements are needed! I read this and shake my head…. and they wonder why there are unclaimed Captain vacancies at these bases. I wonder if this might be a generational and cultural change as the next gen of major pilots seek to be committed spouses and parents, and money isn’t the ONLY thing. These jobs are awesome (wanted it since i was 16), but people used to compare them to the pre-covid job market. I read an article that nowadays 1 in 7 jobs on Linked-In are work from home all/most of the time. That’s not everyone’s bag of chips, but it illustrates the importance of QOL as things shift. Money AND QOL.

Although, if they could hire all 20 somethings with no fam’s or commitments that want to work 20 days, party, and non-rev to beaches the other 10 days then the company would be covered. Eventually those people get older too though.

 

Does the airbus fleet have such high time lines?

 

for March? Yes. At least in DC. Mine was built over 89 (didn’t ask it to be) and im well above the G line.

Take a look at the G line document. That will show every seat/ fleet planned flying hours for PBS build.

 

For SFO CA, yes.

This month are some of the worst lines I've seen in around a decade. Very few lines below 80. Most of the bottom half of lineholders are at 89+.
And this is only March.
I haven't looked at other BESs, but if you go to the System Documents tab in PBS and look at PBS G Line and Bidding Parameter Document, you'll see that many BESs had an LCF of 78, LCA of 84, and LCC of 90. That's bad if you don't want to work all the time.
With an average of 84,the bottom half of lineholders are going to be close to the LCC because the top lineholders will be asking for flying closer to the LCF.

This is not a sustainable pace and United will have to either reduce block hours or get a whole lot more pilots checked out and flying the line. It looks like it's going to be a brutal summer.

It looks bad for everyone except 777.

 

Andy you SFO based on the 73?? It would be absolutely hilarious if we’re able to go grease some Guppy’s together. I have a feeling I’d recognize you about 5 minutes after push.

And yeah the lines are terrible.

Edit: nvm I see you’re on the French bus.

 

No, sorry. I'm on Fifi.
LOL; what I write on here is quite a bit different than my personality is in person.
I know I come off like someone who would steal candy from a baby here, but on a typical trip, I'll give out close to 2 dozen plastic wings to kids.
I'm a Zoomie and most FOs are shocked to find out that I'm ex-mil. I'm sure that my fine physical shape contributes to that (hey, round is a shape!).

 

Our lines are built to fly 12-14 days per month and reserve is built to have 15 off. My March line was 13 days of work, but after dropping part of my first trip due to month-to-month overlap corrections and the last trip due to vacation, i'm currently sitting at 9 days of work and 95 tfp (82 hours). Mostly Hawaii flying which is very civilized. Tomorrow's 3-day works 1 leg/day with 24 and 17 hour overnights. But don't tell anyone...

Average days off system wide in March is 17.6

 

United is two different airlines. I'll assume you're not on fifi or the guppy.

 

The high time lines are going to be here for awhile.
The company built the hiring plan to acheive the staffing necessary to fly the planned schedule as they always do. However, that schedule resulted in a hiring plan like we have never seen before. The good news is the intake point of the hiring process was relatively easy to adjust to accomodate the numbers needed. You can still get plenty of folks to interview and hire, albeit some with less experience than we have seen in the past, but still plenty of good quality folks to welcome aboard.

The bad news is pilots that have completed basic indoc are not ready to fly UA jets and the other choke points in training were not as easy to expand to the new required capacity. At this point it appears that the primary limiting factor is OE and the number of LCAs, though I think PI stafiing is not far behind in the contest for most limiting choke point.

So, you have not enough LCAs to do the work coupled with less experienced folks coming in the door that sometimes need more OE than we gave in the past. That means longer and longer wait times for starting/completing OE. Since the ocntract is specific on how many days the company gets as OE blocker days in your schedule, this backlog in OE has created a problem that was being masked initially in PBS. You were getting a good number of folks that were getting a line or reserve PBS requirement that made the solution look good on paper for staffing, but was really just smoke and mirrors. The actual result was a bunch of folks showing in PBS as being available when in fact they were not going to be complete with OE anywhere near the end of their OE blocked days. So, all the reserve coverage or trip coverage that their line showed after the OE blocker days was really not covered at all. The company realized this over the last few months and started pumping up the Line Values across most of the fleets so that reserve staffing would "increase" and whatever the fallout was from incomplete OEs could be more easily covered.

The problem is that I don't see much changing with this problem in the short term as the same analysis that resulted in our current staffing issue is the analysis that was used for the summer and the flying is going to be on a steady increase for the coming months. The return of the PW powered 777s might help, but I believe the use of those aircraft was baked into the plan previously, so not sure if it is really going to help that much.

Couple all this with the staffing crisis at the regionals and the pressure that is going to bring on mainline picking up flying even faster and I don't see an end to the 90 hour lines for a long while!