I have thought about it but here's where my thinking has led. They don't pay for your move and they don't have jumpseat agreements (correct me if I'm wrong).
Correct. But they do give you a $1000 bonus at the end of training (like $780 after taxes). Paid for my move.
So I would either have to leave my family behind, or would have to pay for a move from Montana to the East Coast.
Might not be the east coast, in fact probably wouldn't be. Kansas City, Cincinnasty, St. Louis, Little Rock etc are all bases. When I was there Florida was in high demand, so if you didn't want to sind up there, there's a good chance you could avoid it.
They require an 18 month contract (again, correct me if I'm wrong),
Incorrect, unless something has changed. No contract, but if you leave before six months (I think it's six months), you pay them back the grand they give you at the end of training.
and I wouldn't get paid as much as when I worked with Airnet. Yes they do have some good paying routes, but the chances are slim that I would get one that paid as well as when I worked at Airnet (I got paid really well).
I really think you might be surprised. The pay systems are so different it's practically impossible to compare, but at the current pay rates, my W2s first year would have been high 30s. Yes, I was on a long run, but there are more long runs than short ones. Granted, you can't be sure you'll get a long run out of the gate, but the odds are decent, and you can certainly bid one as your seniority accrues.
Even with the good paycheck I got from Airnet my family and I still had to work hard on getting our monthly budget right. I'm not going to leave my family behind for 18 months because I can't afford to buy plane tickets all the time because they don't have jumpseat agreements. Since I would be taking my family with me, I couldn't get a cheap crashpad, and thus we would be struggling to make ends meet for the next 18 months, while I'm flying a single engine, getting paid less, doing the same thing I was doing with Airnet. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-FLX. The main problem is FLX isn't as family friendly as Airnet. Again, I'm not saying they aren't family friendly, just not near as much as Airnet.
There's nothing wrong with saying FLX isn't family friendly, at least in the sense you mean it, which I read as "friendly towards those pilots with families unable or unwilling to move with them". If I had a wife and kids, I wouldn't take a job at FLX unless I knew they could come with me...it would be awful otherwise. That said, the pay is, I think, better that you might imagine, and the contract doesn't exist. Good luck whatever you decide.
