sorta. You can have line bidding without full trip touch drop. PSA had that. That’s how you ended up with things like seven hour shifts 3-days after they sliced and diced vacation and training conflicts.

You could design a PBS system with trip touch drops. But that really defeats the point. The company wants to eliminate paying people for not flying.

 

You need to also keep in mind if a trip drop created by a conflict is paid or unpaid. Different rules at different airlines. As far as I know only UPS pays end of the month conflicts. They also only have 6 bid periods.

 

The FA's must get paid for conflict drops, or else they wouldn't be fighting for it.

They will then have to put on their thinking caps and determine if keeping line-bidding with be of more overall value than adopting PBS and getting boarding pay/better hotels/etc at the cost of losing line-bidding.

 

The United FA's do get paid for carry over carry in conflicts to a point . Say for instance you have a 3 day trip that starts on the last day of January bid month (ends 2nd day of February). For February you bid a three day trip that starts on the 2nd day of February. The trip is dropped. the third and fourth day of your trip you are pay protected however placed on RX (essentially top of reserve list for reassignment) currently they have the option of dropping those RX days with the forfeiture of pay protection. Many commuters use just as vehicle to gain more days off. Obviously if you hold 28 hour three day long haul stuff...not a wise strategy. Remember however with no mandatory retirement.......there comes a point on the list where there just isn't any movement.......using EWR or IAD as an example ...........three day trips to Western Europe worth 16.5 is about as good as it's gonna get and taking the ability to intentional disrupt away will not help a large chunk of that workgroup so you can see why they don't want it.

 

I've been told numerous times by FAs that they believe that PBS would get rid of 30% of the flight attendants, but somehow Delta and United both have about 28,000 flight attendants, and Delta FAs use PBS.

Complete misinformation.

Also they are stuck on the vacation override, which we used to have as well, but would any of us want to go back to bidding lines or trips you would never want to fly just to try and get an extra couple days of vacation? PBS gives me far greater control over my life and I would not exchange that so I can have a few more days off in a vacation month. Having control of my schedule year round is far more valuable than the 2 or 3 months of vacation where I could get a couple more days off. Also the "I used 4 days of vacation to get 15 days off in a row" well you can do that with PBS as well.

 

It doesn't create more reserves for them. It creates more reserves at the beginning of the month and less throughout the month, since that's when most of their open time is. Its a poor system that they won't let go of. I've been asked numerous times why I like PBS and when I explain it to them they tell me they've never heard of any of the advantages of PBS.

 

From a pilot standpoint PBS can be very useful. As a simple example as an international pilot bid a regular line with most of your flying in the second half of the month. Get as close to 100 block as you can. Next month bid reserve and put all your off days in the 2nd half of the month. Now you are virtually unusable as a reserve that month.

 

Just had a senior mama tell me that she wouldn’t be able to trade using PBS.. After explaining how PBS works, she just defaulted to “yeah, well.. I just don’t trust United. They treat y’all pilots a lot better”

Come to find out, she just didn’t want to learn a new system and way of bidding

Edit to add: She mentioned that with PBS, United would fire schedulers and she didn’t want that for them lol

 

They do not get paid for conflict drops except for vacation touching inasmuch as the trip is actually inside their vacation footprint.

 

Can you blame them for being so suspicious. Along with the company at large, it is in the interest of our workgroup as well as others that they get a contract soon......so when we have senior pilots talking about how great PBS is, and how foolish and backward they are as a workgroup by not wanting to have it. Certainly those types of optics certainly wouldn't convince me it's a good thing no matter how unwise we think their steadfast resistance to PBS is.