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MrYenko posted:
I’m in MIA quite a bit and will absolutely take you up on this ![]()
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 18:59 |
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I’ve reached the point where I have to start applying to regionals and the like and I was wondering if anyone had any insight into Southern Air. They’ve opened an FO program where they give you the ATP CTP and Type akin to the regionals. On one hand I ran into a guy to told me to be very careful about Southern and that working for them might not be well-received by older interviewers in the majors and legacies (essentially “they’re bottom feeders”), on the other I have an Atlas 747 captain telling me to do it and the idea of getting a 737 type and hopping on the Atlas seniority list sounds real freaking cool right now. Please help me not gently caress my career up, tia.
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I used to work for an ACMI airline that looked up at Southern, because we were skeezy as gently caress.![]()
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cigaw posted:I’ve reached the point where I have to start applying to regionals and the like and I was wondering if anyone had any insight into Southern Air. They’ll be Atlas Air here in about 3 weeks when our new contract is announced. It really depends on your career goals, Atlas isn’t for everyone but I love it here. I can’t speak to life on the 73, but if I could’ve skipped the regionals and gone straight to here I 100% would have. If you search my posts a few months back we discussed Atlas at length. Feel free to DM me with any specific questions, there’s another atlas guy here too.
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SNiPER_Magnum posted:Anyone have opinions on GA tires? We stocked almost exclusively Goodyear Flight Radials for GA stuff, Michelin for the jets. I assume other companies make tires, but I haven't seen them on the flightline often enough for the brand to stick in my head. fake edit: DUNLOP! They make the Cirrus stock tire. Err, made. Now it's a Michelin.
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E.pilot are the southern guys going to get your work rules and pay scale? That would be the difference between a yay or nay for me. Atlas vs. Southern was night and day different when I was there and I wouldn't ever recommend going to southern if you were still going to put up with being the B team in an already underpaid part of aviation. Going from a regional to southern seemed like a lateral move at best and didn't seem worth the effort.
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Arson Daily posted:E.pilot are the southern guys going to get your work rules and pay scale? That would be the difference between a yay or nay for me. Atlas vs. Southern was night and day different when I was there and I wouldn't ever recommend going to southern if you were still going to put up with being the B team in an already underpaid part of aviation. Going from a regional to southern seemed like a lateral move at best and didn't seem worth the effort. They already do, the only reason we’re not fully merged is contractual legalities.
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Arson Daily posted:E.pilot are the southern guys going to get your work rules and pay scale? That would be the difference between a yay or nay for me. Atlas vs. Southern was night and day different when I was there and I wouldn't ever recommend going to southern if you were still going to put up with being the B team in an already underpaid part of aviation. Going from a regional to southern seemed like a lateral move at best and didn't seem worth the effort. Atlas… work rules?
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greasyhands posted:Atlas… work rules? Theres a reason Atlas was called "the cream of the crap" when I worked there. They were bad, but everyone else was worse. Way worse. Glad to hear the Southern guys are at least getting a fair shake, E.pilot, I hope after 6 years you guys get something good.
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Thanks for the input, guys. Getting started in the 121 world seems daunting. The Southern Air pathway program seems neat, fingers crossed and all that.e.pilot posted:They’ll be Atlas Air here in about 3 weeks when our new contract is announced. ![]() MrYenko posted:I used to work for an ACMI airline that looked up at Southern, because we were skeezy as gently caress. ![]()
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If you aren’t trying to be a fast burner getting to a legacy carrier as quickly as possible and/or don’t have any intentions of going to a legacy carrier, there’s pretty much no reason not to go to the 73 if you can get it. Regionals are hell, by far the worst part of my career, I couldn’t leave it fast enough.
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I would love to go fly international for the Widget. Getting to a Legacy in a timely manner is certainly a goal but I'm not sure I want to burn the candle at both ends to get there. From what I understand, the turbine PIC requirement have been relaxed and a lot of people have gone right seat to right seat from regionals or cargo ops to majors and legacies. I assume that a 737 type and Southern/Atlas experience would look better than CRJ+Regional on the resume and as actual experience?
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Well if they don’t fix the scope problems then very few Widget pilots are going to be flying international at all. You might be better off at Aeromexico or Virgin Atlantic if you want to fly Widget Pax. Or just go to United. Personally I don’t think it matters what you fly as long as it’s multi engine turbine. A Crj200 checks the same boxes as a 737. Most of the new hires are either military or regional. Occasionally some cargo or corporate but that’s rarer. PIC doesn’t really seem to matter anymore. Pick quality of life and pay over aircraft type every time. I still think that going to a regional is your best chance at going to a legacy. However if you don’t choose that route what matters just as much is connections to people who can give you recs and stuff you do outside of flying like volunteer work or mentoring. There is a massive hiring wave coming at the legacies and the earlier you get hired and better your career will be, especially if your goal is widebody captain.
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cigaw posted:I would love to go fly international for the Widget. I'm curious, if you want international travel why do you want to fly self loading cargo instead of flying for a cargo airline that does a much greater percentage of its travel internationally? How many A220/A320 segments does delta fly for each A350?
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Can someone make an effort post about regional airline pilot quality of life? I’ve been on Google trying to see how “bad” it gets and haven’t found any answers.
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The problem is it varies widely based on who you work for. The good news is that the relative shortage of qualified pilots due to the 1500 hour rule has improved pay and work rules at most companies. There are still some bottom feeders though. The biggest things that will improve your experience is living in base and a company with movement, either by growing or attrition. This can sometimes be counterintuitive because a quality regional can sometimes have little movement compared to a bad one. And movement can sometimes be uncontrollable because a regional does not control their own flying. A company with a flow can be good and bad. It helps with movement at the top but you shouldn’t be relying on that flow to get you a job because of how long it can take and the possibility it can be revoked. Any regional is a gamble. I went to one that was at its absolute rock bottom and losing 70+ pilots a month that suddenly doubled their pay in order to stay in business and turned things around quickly. The regional that turned me down because they had so many qualified pilots applying is no longer in business. Never get too comfortable at a regional. Get in, get your time and move on to a company that controls their own flying.
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Is a widget just a “wide jet”? On the subject. My (may?) app to Atlas is still under review. They’re trying to decide whether to name a base after me no doubt.
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It’s the internet name for a company with the same name as a covid variant. It’s dumb but they are known to be extremely protective of the brand and to crackdown on employees who badmouth them online.
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Kraftwerk posted:Can someone make an effort post about regional airline pilot quality of life? I’ve been on Google trying to see how “bad” it gets and haven’t found any answers. On the CRJ working for one of the “better” regionals I made around 45/hr as an FO with guaranteed 11 days off a month and it was a big deal if you somehow got 12, flying 4-6 legs a day, almost always min rest or as close to min rest it didn’t matter, 3-4 day trips commuting on both ends turns into being home maybe 2-3 days in a row at most, and frequently being home just long enough to essentially do laundry and turn back around. It was hell. Some contrast: It took me nearly two and a half years to fly as much total time on the 767 as I did in a year on the CRJ, and when I did, I did it in less than half as many flights. I get a guaranteed 13 off now and frequently get 14-15 off. Rarely do I have less than 24 hours in between flights, and frequently have 36-48 hours off between flights. At 3rd year pay I get just shy of $100/hr as an FO, about the same as a 10 year captain at the regional I was at. The schedule is more or less week on week off or two weeks on two weeks off, with some clever bidding I can get a whole month off without using any vacation. Using vacation I can easily get a whole month off, combined with said clever bidding can be 2 months off.
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Rolo posted:Is a widget just a “wide jet”? It's Delta. A lot of pilots use these cutesy nicknames for all the airlines to avoid getting in trouble for talking about their employers, which strikes me as about as effective as saying "someone who isn't me keyed my rear end in a top hat neighbor's car last night" if they actually decided to hunt you down, but I don't work for an airline so idk. Delta even calls their own logo "the widget" so like uh
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Sagebrush posted:Delta even calls their own logo "the widget" so like uh Yeah its exceptionally dumb in that case: https://www.deltamuseum.org/exhibits/delta-history/delta-brand/the-widget This is cool though. And the memo that originated the logo
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Kraftwerk posted:Can someone make an effort post about regional airline pilot quality of life? I’ve been on Google trying to see how “bad” it gets and haven’t found any answers. Yeah this is a tough one because of all the variables, even at the same airline. I was displaced from a junior base where I lived to another junior base at the beginning of the year and my quality of life tanked once I had to start commuting to reserve rather than sit at home on reserve. I usually had around 48hrs from when I got home to when I had to be back at the airport to commute to base. I sat in my crash pad for 4-5 days at a time, getting used maybe twice a month for 1-2 day trips, then back to my crash pad, to sit around with the hopes of getting released early so I could catch an earlier commute flight home on my last day. It got to the point that I was so miserable that I was considering any local 135 operation with even shittier work rules just so I wouldn't have to commute to reserve anymore. Now I'm back living in base, but my seniority didn't improve from last April until last month when new hires finally started finishing up training. I'm practically bottom of the seniority list in base right now, but not having to commute means I really don't give a poo poo about what happens to me on my days on, since at the end of it the company is responsible for getting me back home, rather than just back to base (then try to commute home or worse, stay one more night and commute home on my day off if I missed the last flight home). Avoid commuting, especially as a new guy on reserve. Commuting to reserve is a particular level of hell I wouldn't wish on anybody.
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On the "less poo poo" side of regionals, I've been at this one for a bit over seven years, make pretty good money (about $98/hr), and have a 20 minute commute to work. I get about 14 days off per month, our trips are usually 2-4 days, with 3-4 legs a day, and overnights are typically somewhere from 12-16 hours, but there's some at low as 10.5, and some as high as 30hrs. We don't have a formal flow (we have a program where our Eskimo overlords can and do change the rules to move to mainline at will), but because we're wholly owned and allow our parent company to do a lot of creative accounting to make their quarterly numbers look better, we're probably safer from imploding than the ones that aren't owned by a bigger airline. Reserve was hell (I upgraded into a pilot shortage that meant I was on the road 5 days a week for about three months straight), but things got significantly better once I got some seniority and got off reserve. Other people mentioned it, but regionals change so fast that trying to chase an upgrade or a paycheck by swapping regionals is basically futile. I know several people who tried that, and they inevitably got stuck somewhere when the music stopped on fast upgrades at a given place, or jumped ship to one that imploded before they could get a mainline job. azflyboy fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Aug 25, 2021 |
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Yeah, Widget is just Delta. I don’t mean to use it in an airline-that-must-not-be-named way, it’s just what they actually call the logo as mentioned above.Two Kings posted:Pick quality of life and pay over aircraft type every time. I still think that going to a regional is your best chance at going to a legacy. However if you don’t choose that route what matters just as much is connections to people who can give you recs and stuff you do outside of flying like volunteer work or mentoring. There is a massive hiring wave coming at the legacies and the earlier you get hired and better your career will be, especially if your goal is widebody captain. hobbesmaster posted:I'm curious, if you want international travel why do you want to fly self loading cargo instead of flying for a cargo airline that does a much greater percentage of its travel internationally? How many A220/A320 segments does delta fly for each A350? All of this can certainly change in the future as I gain experience and life happens, but right now that’s basically it. ![]() e: I’m fine starting with a cargo job to not only see what it’s like firsthand and at the very least as a stepping stone. cigaw fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Regional pilots do the exact same kind flying as legacy pilots just at a faster pace and with less resources. I was never a better/sharper pilot then when I was doing 5 legs a day in a CRJ. The transition from regional to legacy is easy. It’s the exact same job except better. You’ll also have lots of legacy pilots jumpseating to work on your flights you can bug for recs. Flying long haul international is neat but you’ll spend most of your time in cruise staring at instruments and fighting for landings for currency. If you absolutely want to go to Daddy D it might be worth taking a look at Endeavor. The procedures, call outs, everything is modeled after what Delta does. The transition is almost seamless. Just ignore the flow and bust your rear end to jump the line and get hired off the street. Two Kings fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Just to clarify, the Endeavor flow only applies to pilots on board as of a few months ago :/
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Speaking of regionals with flow, PSA, Piedmont, and envoy all just announced bonuses: -$30,000 to all captains, and to FOs once they upgrade. -$70,000 upon flow to AA -$25,000 per calendar year if you fly enough hours in the previous year. There were also some increases to flow but I don't have the exact details on what those are and they probably vary by airline. So basically if you want to go to AA you need to be a flow through, a fixed wing military pilot, or be the luckiest off the street hire ever. cigaw posted:I foresee the Pax schedule will minimize time away from my family compared to cargo trips. lol, no.
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How long is flow? Or, how long was it pre pandemic
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Thank you all so much for the responses so far. This is really helpful even if I’m starting to think I might be overthinking this. Let me know if baby’s first 121 gig chat is boring and I’ll drop it.Two Kings posted:Regional pilots do the exact same kind flying as legacy pilots just at a faster pace and with less resources. I was never a better/sharper pilot then when I was doing 5 legs a day in a CRJ. The transition from regional to legacy is easy. It’s the exact same job except better. You’ll also have lots of legacy pilots jumpseating to work on your flights you can bug for recs. I’m trying to gauge how much of a difference regional/cargo can make on a legacy app, which I understand is likely conjecture and educated guesswork unless we get a recruiter to pipe in and spill the beans. In your opinion is it a matter of “you gotta fly cargo for another 2 years over a regional guy and have a harder time transitioning on procedures” or more “lol go take your boxes over to UPS you silly man”? KodiakRS posted:lol, no.
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do Delta captains still have to wear that dorky rear end cap because my god it looks dumb
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Sapozhnik posted:do Delta captains still have to wear that dorky rear end cap because my god it looks dumb FO’s too and you better not get caught not wearing it especially while on probation.
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Hat AND a double breasted jacket. Real captain steuben vibe at that airline. Also, having done long haul cargo and domestic pax flying long haul cargo is def the winner. One leg a day while wearing flip flops and sweat pants? Hell yeah. I also know that I would've hated long haul pax flying. Having to do the lav dance with the FA's for 10+ hours can miss me entirely.
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At least at mainline you don't have to do the RJ "walk of shame" or worse the "Tyler Wojo."
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cigaw posted:Last time I checked with Endeavor they only had a guaranteed interview; quote:if there’s a flow now it’s certainly more appealing even if the end goal is to jump the line. There is a flow now, but only for those on property as of when the agreement was signed, a few months ago. Future new hires are not eligible for it. It should hold no appeal, other than pie in the sky hopes for it being expanded to future pilots. FWIW the Endeavor union's position is that we will attempt this, but I would not hold my breath, and certainly not bank years of my life on it. Even the flow that we did get was itself pie in the sky, and we finally got it because we were a 10 dimensional chess piece in a fight between the Delta union and Delta, and Delta won. I would, however, come to Endeavor on all the other grounds of being "one of the good ones" as far as regionals go. But mainly, go where there is a base in your city (however, be prepared for this base closing.) If you go for Endeavor, I'll give you my spam trap email and we'll split the referral bonus? vessbot fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Arson Daily posted:One leg a day while wearing flip flops and sweat pants? Hell yeah. I cannot stress this enough.
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I'm a bit out of the loop as far as regional flows. Are PDT, PSA and ENY the only regionals where new hires are guaranteed a flow to mainline that's not dependent on some sort of interview?
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I think so. Alaska makes it sound like their "Pathways" program is the same thing, but it just guarantees an interview, and Alaska can and will change the criteria to even get that interview whenever Horizon runs short on pilots, which is about every three weeks or so.
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Hi y'all! The aeronautical insanity thread sent me here. I've found a flight school I like and finally pulled the trigger on starting a LAPL. I am very excited to start this journey. But I have some fears / issues I wanted to discuss. Tomorrow my medical is coming up. I am a little bit concerned about it. I am still taking an SSRI antidepressant, Citalopram. They were prescribed to e twice; first when imposter syndrome and a sense of being overwhelmed at work combined with extreme stress at Home due to my partner's illness and brought me close to a burnout. The second time was when I had started a new challenging job in a different fields while still finishing up the old one for a year, and felt more comfortable having a safety net under my health. I should have actually gone to my GP last year to discuss how things are going and potentially devise a plan to taper off again, but COVID got in the way. I don't mind tapering off now however. My neuropsychological functioning was never impacted; reaction times and performance on lab tasks was always good (I should know, that was part of my old job). What I'm worries is what the medical examiner will do about it. I don't mind having to taper off before they give me an all clear, or have an additional examination. What I'm more worried about is that having had psychotherapy for something resembling anxiety+depression+avoidance makes them disqualify me for life. Therefore I'd want to ask you for advice if there are any don'ts for my examination tomorrow.
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KodiakRS posted:At least at mainline you don't have to do the RJ "walk of shame" or worse the "Tyler Wojo." Tyler Wojo?
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 18:59 |
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FunOne posted:Tyler Wojo? Oh sweet summer child. ![]()
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