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Minus bonuses, I made about $85k last year as a regional captain, and if I hang around until the top of the pay scale (18 years), I'd make about $120k. Going to a major, I'd take a slight pay cut for the first year, and everything past that would be substantially more than I'd ever make here. On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for quality of life, since I have a good schedule, get most of the days I want off, and have a whopping 20 minute commute, which is drat hard to give up for more money.
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Jun 13, 2018 23:13
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Most of the regional bonuses are aimed at getting new hires in the door, and retaining them for maybe a year or two. There are some places doing retention bonuses for captains, but like Butt Reactor said, they tend to be places where you'll be commuting to reserve on the east coast somewhere.
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Jun 14, 2018 10:54
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Going through my old W-2's, I made $26k my first year at a regional (in 2014), and that was at what was then one of the highest starting FO pay scales in the industry. Now, you'd probably make $40-50k most places due to various bonuses and higher starting pay, but those bonuses can and will disappear as soon as there's another recession or something else that tanks the airline industry.
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Jun 17, 2018 22:04
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DrDork posted:Other than self-selecting it for whatever reason, what is it that'll keep you stuck at a regional forever? Some of it can be bad timing. I'm at a regional that's seriously top heavy, and a lot of those guys got caught here for several years with the 2001 and 2008 recessions, so they're now in their 50's, and lack college degrees, so it's less work to stay here than try and get to a major.
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Jun 18, 2018 01:50
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My takeoff/landing ratio gets screwed up by the fact that our SOP's require me to take the landing whenever the weather is less than twice the required visibility (and/or within 200' of the ceiling) for an approach, since apparently first officers can't fly an approach to minimums or something.
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Jun 22, 2018 21:51
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Is memorizing the brake energy a Dassault requirement, or something from the operator? Every takeoff and landing performance chart I'm familiar with uses a combination of temperature, weight, and altitude to automatically stay within the brake energy limits, so I'm really struggling to figure out what possible use there is for memorizing that number. It kind of reminds me of one of the questions on the old ATP written exam, which was basically a word problem that assumes pilots are going to pull a calculator out and do a bunch of math in the middle of an aborted landing after touching down.
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Jun 29, 2018 21:51
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I fly into SJC pretty often from the north, and it looks like the changes might help a bit with keeping us inside the Bravo (so we don't have to slow to 200) when approach sends us west of the bay before cutting us back east towards SJC. As far as departing SJC, it probably won't change too much, since they'll still need to use the LOUPE 4 (which takes traffic off the 30's and immediately swings it southeast to climb) until departures are high enough to avoid conflicts with SFO and OAK.
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Jul 5, 2018 00:23
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It may be because it's how I learned, but I'm of the opinion that learning on a "six pack" airplane is preferable (at least initially) to a glass cockpit, since glass can be a bit of "information overload" at first, and my experience as a flight instructor was that it's generally easier to make the transition from analog instruments (where your scan has to move around a fair bit of the panel) to glass (where the scan is much simpler) than the other way around.
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Jul 5, 2018 02:56
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The worst checkout I ever did was with a guy who wanted an IPC in his personal airplane. I probably should have realized something was up when he had no clue how to use the avionics, but I finally told him "that's enough, we're landing" after he got into an ususual attitude twice while trying to intercept a localizer. One of my checkout students was later killed when they crashed the rental 152 I'd checked them out in (while signing off their flight review as well) but since the cause of the accident turned out to be a massive heart attack, the FAA never even contacted me about the investigation.
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Jul 6, 2018 02:17
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Horizon still has 40some Q400's running around, and they're planning to keep at least 30 (until the current management all get fired and their replacements have some brilliant new plan) for the foreseeable future.
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Jul 11, 2018 04:44
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Sagebrush posted:That looks like it will be helpful for my landings, too. However -- he makes a point of how, for this to work, it is important to fly a stabilized approach at no more than 1.3Vs. That seems....awfully slow? In the 152 I'm flying, Vs is between 31 and 35 knots with full flaps. Even taking the high end there, 45 knots is way too slow for my comfort -- we regularly have 10 knot winds and significant gusts. I'm usually coming in at 60-65, which is correct according to the POH. One thing to keep in mind with the "1.3 Vso" figure is where that number actually comes from, since it gets kind of misconstrued. The FAA only recommends using 1.3Vso if there isn't a manufacturer recommended approach speed. Per part 23 (which governs aircraft certification), Vref cannot be less than 1.3Vso, so some aircraft manufacturers use exactly 1.3Vso in their short field performance charts (which are generated using experienced test pilots in ideal conditions), since it gives them better looking numbers for landing distances, but many GA airplanes will have a recommended approach speed that's substantially higher than 1.3Vso.
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Jul 17, 2018 23:11
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Sagebrush posted:So why are they delivering so few? Just because there are no pilots, or because they're so expensive? It's a combination of things. When liability cases against GA manufacturers really got going in the 1980's (due to GA aircraft being a long-lived product and changes in the US legal system), insurance costs for both manufacturers and pilots went through the roof, and combined with inflation, a recession, the GA market becoming saturated, and income inequality becoming more pronounced (which meant fewer customers), it produced a really bad environment for GA manufacturers to survive. The 1994 General Aviation Revitalization Act helped reduce the liability costs (although they're still substantially higher than they were in the 1960's and 70's), but the costs associated with manufacturing and certifying an airplane (to say nothing of the slow decline in the US pilot population) are high enough where companies like Cessna and Piper can't sell enough airplanes for economies of scale to have any impact, which keeps costs up, which just perpetuates a cycle that limits how many airplanes can realistically be sold. Combining that with the fact that GA airplanes can last a very long time, a thriving aftermarket for improving said older airplanes, and kitplanes being substantially cheaper than newly built airplanes, there's basically no way GA manufacturers will ever get close to the production numbers they were seeing up to the 1970's.
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Jul 24, 2018 20:35
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Fuel is substantially more expensive than it was in the 1960's, and the cost of parts (largely due to liability and lack of volume) has increased significantly as well. I can't find exact prices from the 1960's for Avgas, but I'm assuming it was a fair bit less expensive (adjusting for inflation) than it currently is, since leaded fuel was in widespread use at the time for cars and airplanes, so production costs would have been much lower than they are now. A similar situation applies to parts for small airplanes as well. During the 60's, the rate of GA aircraft production was high enough that parts benefited from economies of scale, and there were nowhere near the liability or certification costs as there are now.
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Jul 24, 2018 22:33
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That's a good set of criteria to use. I got a David Clark H10 when I started flying, and that got me through all of my training, 2000hrs of flight instructing, and about two years in the right seat of a Q400, with nothing but occasional mic cover replacements and a set of ear seals, although I did need to get one of the plugs replaced (for $20 at a local stereo repair place) when the internal wiring apparently frayed after being used for almost a decade. Once I started making slightly better money, I upgraded to a Bose A20, and while it's lighter and less "clampy" than the DC headset, I do miss the fact that David Clark builds their headsets to be able to survive abuse, which Bose clearly doesn't.
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Jul 26, 2018 08:19
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sleepy gary posted:What's the story? The 767 is a long airplane, so if the nose is just allowed to drop on landing instead of being "flown on", it can pick up enough momentum to hit the runway with sufficient force to do that kind of damage. azflyboy fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jul 29, 2018 |
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Jul 29, 2018 04:49
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two_beer_bishes posted:Well gently caress. Are they dangerous or will I just be working my as off? I've heard that they tend to treat employees like crap, but I have no clue about their safety record.
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Jul 29, 2018 07:11
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Apparently an employee (not a pilot) stole a Horizon Q400, which just crashed near Seattle, although there's a possibility it was shot down by F-15's scrambled from PDX.
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Aug 11, 2018 05:26
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Yep. There's now reports that it simply crashed, and the confusion was due to the close proximity of the scrambled F-15's.
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Aug 11, 2018 05:43
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I believe it went down on a very sparsely populated island in the San Juans, and there's no reports of any injuries on the ground. Now I'm wondering how much longer I'll have a job, since Horizon was already the unloved stepchild of Alaska, and this could be the excuse to shut us down and outsource all the flying to non- union regionals.
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Aug 11, 2018 06:57
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One of the radio transmissions mentioned something about the minimum wage, and Alaska has actually gone to court (and lost) to try and argue that neither the Port of Seattle nor the city of Seatac have the authority to raise the minimum wage at the airport. Turnover for ramp workers in SEA (at least at Horizon) tends to be absurdly high because of how badly they're typically treated by management, so I'd like to think this would lead to some soul-searching by some Alaska executives, but that's probably not going to happen.
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Aug 11, 2018 16:29
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The FAA dropped spins from the practical tests (back in 1949) when they realized that A: most spins that occurred in the real world were happening at low altitudes that were unrecoverable, and B: pilots were being killed doing spin training. Since then, the emphasis has been on teaching students how to avoid getting into a spin in the first place, and since the percentage of accidents caused by stall/spin have been on a steady decrease since the 1950's, that concept appears to work.
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Aug 12, 2018 10:36
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Bob A Feet posted:Q400 can handle a loving loop? Pretty pro move on your first flight in the thing The Q400 is pretty overpowered at low altitudes and light weights (it's 10,000hp on an airplane weighing maybe 45,000lbs) and since there's a ton of lift from the prop wash over the wings on an airfoil that works quite well at low speeds, I can certainly see it being able to perform something like a loop.
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Aug 13, 2018 01:29
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PT6A posted:No one needs one. Exactly what he said. Commercial aviation in the US is a spectacularly fickle industry that goes through a complete meltdown about every 10 years, whenever the US economy so much as hiccups. For the next decade or so, airlines will have to hire substantial numbers of pilots to replace retirements, but if you decide to go the airline route, be aware that you're almost certain to experience some combination of getting furloughed, having your employer file Ch.11 in order to get out of their union contracts, or have to start over at the bottom of a seniority list somewhere else when your employer files bankruptcy and liquidates. I absolutely love what I do, but I'd have a seriously hard time recommending that someone with an established career (especially if you've got a family) spend the money to get an airline job.
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Aug 13, 2018 06:44
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cigaw posted:Oddly enough, I was just watching that today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzy9jCFk0Iw Seattle went through a stretch where airlines were landing on a taxiway on a pretty regular basis, since there's a taxiway that's the exact same dimensions and materials as the runway, and they look almost identical when they're wet and the sun is low in the sky. As far as I know, none of those pilots were fired, and the standard thing is for the airline to take the pilots off the line, investigate what happened, maybe send them through some extra training and then release them back onto the line. For non-airline pilots, it's generally some phone calls with the FAA, possibly a 709 ride (flying with an FAA inspector to demonstrate that you're competent to keep your pilot certificate) and some remedial training, and maybe a certificate suspension if the pilot in question did something egregiously stupid.
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Aug 14, 2018 21:42
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Some people get into this mindset that everything on Guard must be related to an emergency of some kind (or some other "serious business" use), and no other uses are permitted. I suspect these people are generally miserable old bastards who hate their lives, and are taking it out on anyone they can.
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Aug 17, 2018 07:57
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There's a guy who works Big Sky approach/departure who always sounds really chipper and happy to be at work. I'm pretty sure it annoys some people, but the guy sounds like he seriously loves his job, so it always makes me feel a little better when I'm finishing a long trip, get handed over to Big Sky, and the person on the other end of the radio sounds thrilled to talk to me, even if it's pushing midnight. On the flip side of the coin, there was a woman who worked as a ramp controller at SEA who had some kind of dysphonia that caused her to draw out words that started with an "A" or an "H". Unfortunately, Alaska and Horizon both have a huge presence in SEA, so having to listen to "Aaaaaaaalaska 1234, give way to Hhhhhhhorizon, then clear to push" got really painful when the ramp frequency was busy, but I felt bad for the woman, since she was good at the job but just took way too long on the radios.
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Aug 18, 2018 07:13
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Someone online is selling this. I think it's hilarious, some of my co-workers, not so much... https://imgur.com/a/pXypQeR azflyboy fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 05:19
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PT6A posted:Any other instructors have advice on how to deal with a student who really, really wants to flight test this weekend to make a deadline for an aviation college, despite already failing one flight test (and how!), and turning in a rather poo poo flight during our review today (we're talking at least one outright failed item, and two that were right on the line)? I don't know exactly how things work in Canada, but can you have him do a mock checkride with another instructor? I had a couple of students like that, and having them go through the checkride process with someone who wasn't their normal instructor generally served to get the point across that it wasn't just me being a dick about things. If all else fails and this person is hell-bent on taking the checkride, I'm assuming you can simply refuse to sign them off or recommend them for the test, which is a perfectly legitimate course of action, since you're not only keeping them from doing something stupid, but you're protecting yourself and making a good judgement call in the process. azflyboy fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Sep 6, 2018 |
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Sep 6, 2018 07:15
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Cessna posted:So if someone fails a checkride like that is it pretty much the end of their flying career? In the civilian world, it generally depends on what checkrides you fail, and how many of them you fail. Generally, a failed checkride during training is pretty normal (especially for the CFI checkride), but if there's a pattern of failures, that's going to raise some questions at job interviews. Once you get into the part 135 or part 121 world, failed checkrides are a much bigger deal, since you're supposed to know what you're doing at that point and, you're generally taking a checkride once a year as part of recurrent training.
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Sep 7, 2018 00:11
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Rolo posted:I’ve gotten flight instructor jobs where they never at any point asked to see my pilots license. The regional I work for had someone get 90% of the way through the interview process before anyone realized the guy had zero flight time in actual airplanes.
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Sep 7, 2018 18:04
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It's worth pointing out that a lot of the increase in starting pay at regionals is various bonuses that can and will go away the next time the economy has a little hiccup and the airline industry shits the bed again.
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Sep 8, 2018 06:08
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PT6A posted:It doesn't seem to me that a lack of experience in icing conditions meaningfully affected what happened. Icing may have caused the approach to stall, but it was reacting improperly at that point which caused the crash. Like any incident or accident, there's a chain of causes and breaking it at any point would result in the crash not occurring, but it would seem to me that inadequate training on approach-to-stall and stall recovery is a much more significant factor than icing. Icing didn't play a role in the Colgan accident, as far as the NTSB determined. At the time, there was some discussion about the use of the "Ref speeds" switch, which tells the airplane to use a lower critical AOA for the stick pusher/shaker when it's turned on, but it doesn't change where the wing actually stalls. The most plausible scenario is that the captain pulled back on the yoke either because he panicked or because he half-remembered a video on tailplane icing that Colgan had as part of their training, which does discuss increasing back pressure to break that stall.
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Oct 6, 2018 17:45
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It's still 121 passenger ops only, but there's occasional (unsuccessful) pushes various unions to try and change that.
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Oct 8, 2018 21:48
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My worst students tended to be one-off situations. The worst pilot was a guy doing an instrument proficiency check (in his own airplane) who managed to get into several unusual attitudes while trying to track a VOR radial or a localizer. Needless to say, I didn't sign him off, but he at least understood why. The most "WTF?" was a guy who had some connection to the House of Saud, and after prop-striking the airplane on landing at another airport, flew it back with a bent propeller, and then put it back in the hanger and assumed we wouldn't notice the prop having some new bends in it. When the damage was discovered, he paid the $8k overhaul bill in cash, but finally left after it became clear none of us trusted his judgement enough to sign anything off.
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Oct 22, 2018 05:29
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In the last week, I've been within a couple minutes of being forced to divert to Yakima, WA (known for growing many of the hops used in the US, and cooking most of the meth for central Washington) on two separate occasions, so clearly the universe thinks I need more beer and amphetamines in my life. The first time was with a medical emergency, which thankfully got better enough that we could continue to Seattle, and the one today was caused by Seattle stopping all arrivals after the weather dropped below CAT III minimums, which had us holding down to within 5 minutes of when we'd have to divert before the field opened up again. Also, whoever decided "close a runway in Seattle in the fall" was a good plan needs a swift kick in the groin, since it makes everything at that airport even more of a disaster than it normally is.
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Oct 23, 2018 05:35
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Butt Reactor posted:Since I no longer seem to fly anywhere west of Denver anymore what's up with SeaTac? Long story short, the Delta/Alaska dick-waving contest at SEA has the airport scheduled for more arrivals per hour than it can handle on a clear, VFR day, which means there's flow 24/7 now. If the winds force SEA to operate off 34's, they have to halt departures every so often for traffic at BFI to depart, which can easily mean 90 minute delays if it's VFR, and "It's quicker to walk from PDX" delays if it's IFR. Last month, Seattle closed one of their two CAT III runways for construction (since we all know SEA never has low visibility in the fall), and has taxiway construction going that's removed their ability to taxi airplanes if the RVR falls under 600. The last week, it's had RVR's in the 5-700 range for a few hours in the morning, so things have been even more of a disaster than usual there.
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Oct 24, 2018 18:01
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a patagonian cavy posted:That led to a situation INTERNET HEARSAY AHEAD where an airliner captain said they were delayed for a C172 which was going into Boeing. Having heard how bent out of shape some airline crews get with the SEA delays (especially if they don't deal with it every day), I'd totally believe that. It's now to the point where I explain flow delays as "Seattle is currently very bad at being an airport" when I'm making a PA telling the passengers why we're an hour late.
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Oct 24, 2018 19:30
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PT6A posted:It... appears you do not need to be on such a flight plan in US class B as long as you have a clearance...? Yep. As long as you've been given specific clearance into the airspace, you can operate VFR without a flight plan in US class B.
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Nov 2, 2018 04:39
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Most large airplanes normally take off with the engines producing less than their rated power, since it saves a significant amount of money from reduced engine wear, and most runway/load/temperature combinations don't require full power to meet the takeoff performance requirements. FADEC allows the engine to produce as much power as possible without exceeding temperature or RPM limits, but there's still a lot of cost savings in taking off at reduced power settings whenever possible. One of the nice things about FADEC is that it's typically smart enough to know if an engine quit, so it's pretty common for there to be systems that will either automatically run the good engine up to full power if one quits on takeoff, or it'll let the good engine produce more than the maximum rated thrust for a short time.
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Nov 25, 2018 20:22
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MrChips posted:Call me cynical, but any time I see "central Florida" and "aviation" in the same sentence, my mind immediately and directly goes to "fraud on a massive scale". I will say that on paper, the business model can work (it's basically what Allegiant does, but with smaller airplanes), but the airline industry is notoriously brutal for smaller companies, and they're running old TSA airplanes that spend a ton of time broken, so I suspect they're probably a fuel price hike (or the owner getting tired of shoveling money into the airline) away from shutting down.
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Nov 30, 2018 11:15
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