SKYW Question.. What does PBid mean for vacations?

[FishandFly]

Hey guys.

At ASA we can consistantly turn each 7 days of vacation into 21+ consecutive days off by bidding a line that has conflicting trips and a large block of consecutive days off elsewhere in the month.

JA seems to be trying to get us into your PBS system. So I started to wonder if your vacations are any different from ours.

 

[CFIT]

At SkyWest we bid for the year for our vacation, which by the way is coming up next month. The vacation time is awarded based on your seniority for the seat, equipment, and base at the time of the award. When the awarded time comes for the bid period it is blocked out by software protocol and will not allow a conflict bid. Meaning there is no way you can have a vacation block that will overlap a trip or a trip that overlaps a vacation. If you bid for a week off then thats what you will get, and if you are senior enough then you can bid to have trips end days before the vacation block or start days afterwards. That is one of the pitfalls of PBS. The only thing that is kind of good about it is that you can assign how much value you want for each day of vacation which I think falls between 2.5 and 4.25 hrs per day. So if you don't have a bunch of vacation time accrued but want a lot of time off then you can elect to have the minimum time assigned, and vice a versa.

Sounds like what you have at ASA is much more beneficial, which is probably why they want you to go with PBS.

Be very, very careful with the details of PBS (especially if it's the AOS product) before you allow it in your contract. The devil is in the details, and PBS can be quite a concession from what you guys have.

 

[Medeco]

YES!

AOS is what ASA wants us to use even though they have not officially said this.

Skywest Pilots,

Please give examples of what you wish you had in terms of limitations or guarantees written into the AOS system.

For example, is there a limit on block time the company can assign to you out side of the legal FAA time?

Medeco

 

[bayoubandit]

A real problem with the PBS is that mgmt. can make changes and does at any time without our consent. I know big surprise.

PBS won't allow you to time out by the end of the year. It will cap your block time to keep you working. We don't get paid for timing out anyhow.

We cannot bid for recurrent. It is preassigned by training and has aweful limits. My next PC starts at 0400 after I finish at 1800 the night before.

Vacation accural needs to be increased for the reason in the above post. If your luck you can bid for a group of days off to minimize vacation time used. But that is only if you don;t bid for master vacation.

PBS averages the time out. In other words if the company wants an average of 90 hrs per pilot PBS will make it work whether you bid high or low, yo may not get want you want at all.

If you hold a composite line (both reserve and line flying) you have no way to bid what time you want your reserve block to be.

I'm no expert in this stuff but this is what I've noitced. I biid very generically. I don't have much seniority so I don't bid for specific pairings and therefor don't delve too deep into PBS.