Flyer00

For those of you who have now had some opportunity and time to spend using PBS with your respective contract/agreement, I'm looking for some information. I'm looking for facts here, not the "when I was jumpseating, I heard from a guy" crap... And I've already heard the usual..."it benefits the top of the list, sucks when you're at the bottom." I'm looking to get information beyond that, an actual objective look at what it can and can not do. Thanks!!

1) Give me one pro and one con of the system
2) What is the best feature or option that you can use to sort through pairings that you use most?
3) Are there any features or sorting/search options that you wish were available?
4) Is there any one feature that really stands out in the system that is a must have?
5) Were there any holes in your contract that your company was able to exploit?
6) Anything else you would care to share about your experiences...

Thank you for taking the time to answer and share your opinion!

rickair7777

1. Pro: You can essentially always get specific days off (except holidays) regardless of seniority, unless you are dead last on the list. Good for family stuff. Con: The lines are not built according to "common sense" so if you're junior you can experience some scheduling silliness that you might not see with hard lines.

2. I don't bid pairings, I bid schedule.

3. See #2

4. Some sort of predictive feature, ie if you bid for ONLY afternoon shows, SAN overnights, noon releases, fly west in the AM, east in the PM (so you don't have to stare into the sun) it should give you INSTANT feedback that based on the available pairings you don't have a chance in hell. That way you can adjust your bid NOW, instead of adjusting next month after you get awarded crappola.

5. No contract, but at my last carrier PBS was killed by the union because the company wouldn't agree to appropriate contract language. It is essential to have airtight language.

6. Your personal PBS results = your seniority X your computer programming skill. Junior guys with skills do OK, senior guys with no skills can get hosed. Training is essential, but some of the old guys will just never get it (but they can always pay computer-savy FO's to bid for them).

SharkyBN584

1. Pro - You can tailor your schedule better to what your doing from month to month. Con - It can totally f*ck you if you don't bid correctly.

2. You can use the "trip" button on PBS to filter out the trips your looking for (i.e. hightime 4 days)

3. I wish it would let us make better use of "if" statements (i.e. Avoid Day Trip 3 IF followed by Day Trip 3 - a line like that would prevent back-to-back 3 days).

4. Set Min Days Off 3

5. Watch out for results that were "Manually Awarded" as well as with holding to many pairings for IOE.

6. You gotta make PBS work for you. I bid hoping that it will go into denial mode and work backwards. That way, if it does go into denial mode, it will still give me the best schedule possible. If it DOESN'T go into denial mode, then I'll have the best schedule in the company. It's complicated, but it works.

flyboy1987

Please provide an example. Will take it to those doing our '08 contract.

rickair7777

The parameters set into PBS by the company determine the pilot's ability to get what he wants out of PBS. These paramters must be specified contractually or the company can "optimize" PBS to squeeze more work out of you, or make you work at their convenience.

At a minimum you want to ensure that you don't lose something you already had prior to PBS. Example...

Vacations:
1) Many traditional contracts provide that if you are awarded a trip that touches your pre-planned vacation, you drop the entire trip with pay...ie extra vacation! PBS will automatically schedule your flying for the month AROUND your vacation to ensure there are no overlaps. There will be no trips dropped with pay, so effectively you are losing something you already had....the only fair compensation in my mind is an increase in vacation accrual for crewmembers.
2) It will be difficult to schedule regular days off immediately before or after vacation because PBS will need you to be legal for the flying that it does assign that month, so you get less continuous time off when you take vacation.
2) If vacation is assigned a low credit value for scheduling purposes (has nothing to do with pay), then PBS will still try to award you a high-credit line AROUND your vacation... you get a week off, but PBS fills the rest of the month with flying, with minimum legal rest between. The problem here is that PBS basically steals your regular days off. The solution is to assign vacation days a high credit value (like 6+ hours) so a week of vacation will count as 42+ credit hours. If PBS needs to build an 80 hour line, then it will only add 38 hours of flying during the remainder of the month (You can always pick up open time if desired).

Days Off:
1) PBS may end up chipping away at folks who normally get a lot of days off. How do you compensate for that? It's hard to pin down a value but maybe increase the min days off for everybody?
2) Contiguous days off: The company will want to set this at 2 (actually they would like it to be 24 hours, but they are probably not brazen enough to even ask ). You REALLY want to hold out for 3 days contiguous...local pilots can always waive that on a monthly basis when they bid, if they desire.

Bottom line is that there are a LOT of variable parameters which determine how PBS functions...NONE of these variables should be left in the company's unilateral control! Even a seemingly harmless variable can later be tweaked to hurt you! Two suggestions:
1) Hire an outside IT consultant to support PBS testing. You might have an IT-experienced pilot in house, but will he be able to devote all of his time to this? I'm talking about PROFESSIONAL IT experience, with a masters degree and experience on large systems, not some guy who built his own gaming PC.
2) During PBS testing you should be able to determine which variables are important. But you will still want contract language that ensures that NO parameters WHATSOEVER may be changed from the values used in testing without written approval from the pilot group. Otherwsie management will find SOME way to tweak them to your regret.

In negotiations, remeber that PBS is going to save the company big bucks...you DO NOT need to give up something to make this happen. At the very least hold on to what you have.