Empire cargo is in Idaho and Kenmore Air is in Seattle. Not sure what kind of dispatch or flight following set up they have. Virgin America is in SFO but thats farther south than you might like.
The 121 world can be boing for many days and then mildly busy for some followed by days where for 10 hours you have so many phone calls, ACARS message, load control issues, weather stuff, maintenance, ATC that you dont have time to even stand up or use th bathroom. In my shop, the stress gets so intense sometimes that people have had heart attacks and even have died on the job where I work. However, this is countered by those VFR days where you dont have a lot of load control issues and where you have almost no alternates or pilots calling asking for weather briefs and complaining about ATC delays.
In the 121 world everything is scheduled. Each airline has a different way of dividing up the work load. Some do it by hub, aircraft or region. Where I work, it is random. I might have three MSP inbounds and then one JFK outbound and then an ATL to Belize flight followed by three outbounds from Detroit. It changes everyday. The worst stations and flights to get are the ones that are negative ACARS. When we get those, we have to get the load numbers from the captain and input them, read them back and then give hin takeoff and landing numbers. It takes about five to ten minutes and in the meantime, you get ACARS messages and overfuels along with weather changes. That can make good weather and maintenance days busy.
Bad weather and bad maintenance delays means a lot of stress. You are always playing what if games and wondering about the worst case scenario when weather is near mins or storms are forecast. Maintenance stuff can make things tricky. Try sending an aircraft to JFK or ATL with the FMS and RVSM deferred at departure time and your preferred route is on an RNAV route with ATC mad at you for needing to avoid OTS VORs on the way that other aircraft with working FMS and GPS can do easily.
Its always a challenge getting our birds into airports with poor weather, short runways and with aircraft that have a half dozen MELs with pilots that complain about having to fly the aircraft.
At the end of the day though, we find a way to make it work. There are many things we do for pilots that they dont even know about. Countless times Ive asked for ship swaps to get better aircraft. Either the CAT II was deferred or it had one of the many MEL items we have. One of our funny MEL items is one that requires the wing tanks to be completely full or the one MEL that requires a minimum flight weight with gas to be put on if the zero fuel weight is below that number that can never be used.
In the summer, routing aircraft around tstorms is very fun. You learn to be creative quick. Each situation is different. In flight, crews always ask for ways around weather and its a great feeling to tell a captain the best way to go and to watch him do it.
