R2F
New Member
Awesome, thanks a lot av8tr1!
Lots of Entry Level Survey Jobs (CSEL w/ Instrument Rating to fly 172s for Pictometry)
- Thread starter srn121
- Start date
Currently working this season. You fly a lot, you may or may not like your airplane, you make a decent amount of money, you keep track of your expenses for tax purposes since you're a 1099 private contractor. What exactly do you want to know? I've been here a few months and have averaged about 100ish per month. Typically it's probably around 80 hours a month I would say, but it really depends on what you put into it. If it's a 50/50 chance you can shoot some rev- go check it out and get some hours at the very least.
daydreamer
Well-Known Member
Are you by any chance doing the hurricane flying due to Harvey and Irma ?
Well, I spent the last few weeks in TX and now the next few weeks in FL
Air America seems like it could be a great company to work for but be very careful accepting the contract. If anything happens to the plane you can be held liable. Literally anything, if its parked at the airport closest to the job site and a severe thunderstorm rolls through, expect a bill for the hail damage. As an independent contractor you will have no true independence as the company tells when and where to work. The only thing gained by being an independent contractor is covering all cost your self and paying a higher tax.
Hiboglossi
The Most Depressing Person
Precisely why I recommend against working for Air America. As for the bolded part, the pilot contracts specifically say you are responsible for any damage that happens while the airplane is in your "custody". So be ware if you are looking into Air America. I'm not sure if a pilot has been held responsible damage in such a situation, but the fact that the contracts are written to specifically allow it should be a red flag.
64875 was nearly destroyed twice and I know there were damage to other planes in the fleet as thunderstorms and other weather blew in before they could be put in the hangar. Thankfully in those days they didn't go after pilots for damages. Stuff happens in aviation and I remember one of the Pictometers who used to work at Landcare getting pushed off the taxi way by freak winds after a mission where none of the forecasts predicted such winds and with his VFR day reserve he didn't have many options, thankfully he got a briefing and the FAA exonerated him, but it's scary to think that in a situation like that he could've been on the hook for quite a bit of money.
Air America's got the pockets to treat their pilots better and I hope they've finally increased the pay from where it was several years ago as the initial pay structure was set up like 6 or 7 years ago and not adjusted one bit for inflation or the hotel and rental car rates who's rates have outpaced it by a factor of two, three and sometimes much more depending on the market. From what I'm hearing from pilots there also seems to be a lack of a safety culture all I'll say is don't take an Aztec and If management tries to push you to relocate in difficult weather or fly an unairworthy bird you can put your foot down. Word is management won't make such requests in text or email, but over the phone to cover their own asses and as a pilot even though you're low-time you're the PIC and can and absolutely should tell them no. As for the Aztecs I've heard maintenance has gone incredibly down hill and a line guy I met earlier this week told me an Aztec had an engine fire on his ramp. I know they also had numerous engine failures in them and while you might make more money and get more twin time you'll ultimately slow yourself down if your goal is to get ATP mins as the Aztecs don't fly as much due to maintenance and higher altitude projects.
It used to be a great company and I loved working there, but just contrast their pay, benefits and how they treat pilots with Skylens. Skylens has increased their pilot pay, bonuses and benefits since they first came on the scene 3 or 4 years ago and is the company to go to, why is it that Air America which has pilots as independent contractors couldn't increase pay to offset the ever increasing price of hotels and instead decided that they needed to go after pilots, demanding more for breaking the contract and also demanding pilots pay up (or have their pay withheld) for whatever damages happened to a plane the pilot might have been assigned. I don't know if they're just desperate for money due to all the mishaps they've had due to epic incompetence or if they just decided they needed to be paid much more at the expense of the pilots.
Also their safety culture has gone way down hill. Go look at their accident record (kind of tough to find them all as they have so many LLCs for all their aircraft) before one of their current manager was put in charge and then look at how many Aztecs have been heavily damaged or destroyed, not to mention what happened to N21767.
I guess more specifically how much imc do you guys usually log, contract lengths, how long to you typically work a project for, & how is management? also what is a lowest cloud layer needed to depart for a project
Also when they are coming after pilots for damage to planes I wonder if it impacted this pilots decision to kill both engines before he was forced to land gear up. You can see that he came in high and fast and barely stopped before the end of the runway and if anything happened he wasn't going to get those engines started for a go around and was 100% committed to that landing.
I wonder how much "How much will I owe Air America" was going through the pilots head when he attempted that landing, killed both engines and glided in.
You can jump ahead to 4mins in.
If you do go the Air America route have them email you a copy of the contract before you agree to anything to see if it's something you'll agree to rather than waiting until you get to DAB to start the season where it'll be much tougher to walk away. Also I'd stay the hell away from the Aztecs as they've had so many incidents with them in recent years, most if not all were preventable with good training and maintenance which they did in the past, but at some point in the last 3 years decided to forsake both.
http://www.avclaims.com/n5293y_photos.htm
I wonder how much "How much will I owe Air America" was going through the pilots head when he attempted that landing, killed both engines and glided in.
You can jump ahead to 4mins in.
If you do go the Air America route have them email you a copy of the contract before you agree to anything to see if it's something you'll agree to rather than waiting until you get to DAB to start the season where it'll be much tougher to walk away. Also I'd stay the hell away from the Aztecs as they've had so many incidents with them in recent years, most if not all were preventable with good training and maintenance which they did in the past, but at some point in the last 3 years decided to forsake both.
http://www.avclaims.com/n5293y_photos.htm
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Stephen Ivey
Well-Known Member
I got the call to. They are wanting me to come down for the flight interview pretty fast. My question is what do yall do for health insurance? Also can you not get some kind of aircraft insurance that covers you as an operator?
I'm not sure what the resistance is like these days, but when I was there they were totally cool with us not scud running or expecting to go down to mins when relocating as I think we mostly had an agreement that anything below a 1000' ceilings was up to the pilot.
The 'per diem' isn't really a per diem for tax purposes, but if it's still $120 that's pretty tough these days with a lot of locations, a lot of planning, staying in bad hotels or packing 3 people to a room. The one good thing is that AA used to give you a lot of flexibility on where to base so you could find cheaper locales and potentially places where the town was small and you could walk to the FBO from the hotel or you could find an FBO with great crew rates and so on. There was also little certainty in how long you were going to be in one place so that limited your options on finding places with a weekly rate unless you were willing to gamble a bit. If you don't mind staying in bad hotels you can still do pretty good, but if you become a carrier for bed bugs you're screwing over every place you stay after that. Tripadvisor is your friend as their are plenty of cheaper, well reviewed hotels out there and if you do it right you can stay reasonably in a lot of hotels you might not have considered normally. The good news is a good part of Picto's season when you're up north hotel occupancy rates aren't exactly great so you can arrange deals with hotels too if you're savvy and willing to talk to their sales department or manager. Management used to be pretty good about keeping pilots together so you could save money on rooms by sharing them, but sometimes you might blow your whole 'per diem' and then some on the occasional assignment if you were working alone or there was some big event going on. If they bumped up their per diem somewhat that'd make it much better for the pilot, but it's still not situation I had felt so great come tax time with all the receipts and having some of the hotel ones in someone else's name in case the IRS ever wanted to do an audit. Some hotels are also charging every time a hotel guest uses a shuttle too so that can make things more expensive too.
That's also the money to cover your rental car if you need one which can get pretty pricey too at times of the year and if you're not in a place long enough to get the weekly rate. I'd really recommend getting a costco membership as you can save on car rental rates at times (although only one other driver is covered, the cheap hot dogs and pizza are great lunches too) and I think they just redid their hotels so you might be able to get some much better deals on them too. The problem is sometimes you're splitting a car 4 ways and heaven forbid one of the drivers blows a redlight camera good luck trying to narrow down who was driving it when the person who rented the car gets a ticket a month or two later as well as a fee to put that in their name, you might also have to get used to doing walk arounds every time in case a co-worker wacked something and didn't tell you. I never had too much drama with rental cars and co-workers, but I've heard some horror stories about rental cars over the years.
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What kind of awful hooker hotel charges for shuttle use?
Le Royal Meridien sends a nice Audi A8 to pick me up at DXB. Nice cold water too
\What kind of awful hooker hotel charges for shuttle use?
Le Royal Meridien sends a nice Audi A8 to pick me up at DXB. Nice cold water too
I saw an Embassy Suites near PHX if I remember right. I'll have to check my receipt, but I saw a sign posted in the lobby advertising it the morning I was flying to get off the road.
Hilton going downhill fast I see.....
If I ever saw that I would knock them off my future use list.
I could expect that from Marriott, but Hilton I was a bit surprised with and I figure that might just be an independent location. Having made well over Diamond this year I've been very pleased with Hilton so far.
I used to be only Hilton for years and generally had a good experience, then my switch back to Middle East Customers killed that since Hilton doesn't have any quality properties in my area. Back to Marriott (mostly Ritz Carlton though) and SPG locations.
Hiboglossi
The Most Depressing Person
It wouldn't surprise me at all of that was part of the reason. You may recall a former AA mechanic asked about that decision on the AA scum Facebook page after that incident. Most people couldn't think of a safety benefit to shutting them down prior to landing. I do hope Air America didn't dock them for damages, never heard if they did or not.
I left Air America in mid 2016 so it could be different now but I never got any resistance for not flying or relocating. Actually the last relocation I did took me 8 days (it was South Dakota to the west coast in March and I refused to do mountain crossings unless it was day VFR with little probability of mountain waves), and never got any flak. Of course that plane had an inop attitude indicator so I had to go VFR anyway.
I never heard of a 1000' ceilings guideline though, maybe that was more under the Sherwood administration? I wasn't there but I was told that when most of the 172s set out from DAB at the beginning of the 2014-15 season, it was very low ceilings and Nini told all the new pilots he didn't "want to hear anything about personal minimums", implying there would be trouble if any pilot decided not to go because of low ceilings. But of course that was an unusual case since management was right there; actually now I remember a month earlier Sherwood pressured another pilot and I to relocate from DAB to south Florida on an IFR day with heavy showers and a few embedded thunderstorms.
"Per diem" at air America absolutely is taxable as it is lumped in with flight pay on the 1099, so it's not like per diem at a legitimate employer. But at least you can deduct the actual amount spent on expenses. It is true the $120 is often barely adequate, especially if you end up somewhere expensive. And even in the 2 years I was there hotels and other expenses got noticeably more expensive. If you end up by yourself in an expensive area you will likely be spending most of it, and sharing rooms is really the only way to conserve much per diem. And of course I doubt the IRS would allow a deduction with a hotel receipt in someone else's name, unless you could prove you reimbursed them. Most of the time sharing rooms worked out fine, but there could be issues like that, also some people were point hogs and insisted on staying at their preferred rewards brand and having it in their name. Another issue is when another pilot I was sharing accommodations with broke his PS4, falsely accused me of braking it and tried to get management to dock my pay. I have to hand it to SkyLens for providing individual rooms.
What kind of awful hooker hotel charges for shuttle use?
Le Royal Meridien sends a nice Audi A8 to pick me up at DXB. Nice cold water too
Only place I had that was the Days Inn by MKE. It was exactly the kind of "awful hooker hotel" you'd expect.
I joined on when Sherwood's predecessor was still on board. He was an extremely hard worker, had his instructor ratings and stressed safety as he and other MEIs he trusted were doing most if not all the checkouts. He was also working a 6/2 and putting the company ahead of his family so I still can't understand why he was shown the door as he was probably at least in the very upper tier of chief pilots or whatever you would call his position as I can't think of an incident we had while he was in charge and he was a very hard worker who led by example. We also had some great senior pilots that probably didn't get the respect they deserve even at times from me as I owe guys like Jim Dagenais greatly. The newer Air America model was to run the pilots hard and then when they got burned out or wanted more money they were shown the door and I can understand why, but the older guys were typically much wiser and had a better idea of when not to fly and now they don't have that problem at all, because people can't wait to bail even after the first season and absolutely by the second.
Sherwood got a bad reputation at times and I wonder how much power he actually had or if he was just a fall guy and never really had much power to insulate the management above him, but thankfully his company Sandhills seems to be focusing on pilots and their QoL and unlike AA they seem to already have enough pilots as a result. I didn't have to relocate much IMC at AA, but there was a time we had an hour long relocation in IFR weather and I'm just like "Hey we'll get up early the following day and fly down there to acquire" he was perfectly cool as the weather was crap there too with a front moving through both areas with that and the following morning we arrived on station before window open.