I’m afraid there is a fair amount of ignorance amongst the pilot group on this subject. Straight seniority (100/0) produces very low satisfaction rates in a PBS system, which is much different and worse than bidding hard lines. The nuances of why that is the case are not necessarily intuitive but I will attempt an explanation.
A 100/0 system essentially has, within the confines of training and previous month crossover patterns, the most senior pilot building his own roster. #2 builds from what is leftover and so on... This gives seniority far more control than bidding hard lines within a traditional system. Therefore, more pilots in the middle of the list (let’s call it the middle 70%) get even less of what they want than they would in a hard line system because the most desirable patterns have been cherry-picked and stacked together.
If straight seniority is truly the democratically chosen preference, then the AOAs should be pursuing a hard line bidding system, which the Company will never agree to because of the potential to run trips into leave, carryover patterns, etc. So we have a complex PBS (JCR) program, we should use it as it is designed to run, which is to get the greatest number of pilots their greatest number of preferences filled as much as possible.
I don’t know if 75/25 is the answer, but I believe it is in the ballpark. We should be looking at other airlines’ pilot groups (with similar route structures) using PBS to make this determination. Transparency is not gained by 100/0 but by having a proper pilot oversight committee imbedded within the PBS process to ensure things are being done correctly. Will this be a challenge at CX because of their decades long inclinations to manually interfere? Yes, I suppose it will. Therefore, the power of the oversight committee needs to be clearly defined from the outset.