New 1500 / ATP for 121 Rule, details?

[Cherokee_Cruiser]

I'm curious to see where you're getting the "nearly half the pilot group came out of paying for jobs program at Gulfstream." You're saying the equivalent of every FO we have went to Gulfstream? 'Cause that would be about half. Lemme see.....none in my class. None in my upgrade class. When I was an FO, I flew with TWO guys that went to Gulfstream. Since I upgraded, I've flown with.....well, zero. I'd say we've got way more guys from UND or ATP than Gulfstream.

In total, around 550 (give it or take a dozen) have gone from Gulfstream to Pinnacle since the two have coexisted.

 

[Cherokee_Cruiser]

TAs for ATP shouting "quick, get your time and get a job! Hurry!", it's the same as when they were shouting "quick, seniority is everything! Run!"... a few years ago. .

Oh, it still is. Had I been hired in 2006 instead of 2007 at Pinnacle, I would have been like kellwolf: upgrade in 2008 and build PIC time for 3 years since then. Today, he's getting his resume ready for Southwest and JetBlue. Today, I sit waiting for an upgrade slot still 200 numbers away, with an undetermined effect by the upcoming SLI. *ANYONE* who tells you that seniority doesn't matter in this industry or that you should delay getting hired is LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH! "Quick, seniority is everything" is TRUE. It was true in 2006, it was true in 2007, and it is true even today.

 

[jhugz]

Oh, it still is. Had I been hired in 2006 instead of 2007 at Pinnacle, I would have been like kellwolf: upgrade in 2008 and build PIC time for 3 years since then. Today, he's getting his resume ready for Southwest and JetBlue. Today, I sit waiting for an upgrade slot still 200 numbers away, with an undetermined effect by the upcoming SLI. *ANYONE* who tells you that seniority doesn't matter in this industry or that you should delay getting hired is LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH! "Quick, seniority is everything" is TRUE. It was true in 2006, it was true in 2007, and it is true even today.

How about stop chasing the quick seniority upgrade and making your current location a viable place to be employed for at least 5-10 years?

 

[Bumblebee]

because a regional is not a career...he isn't going to be able to make it a career. I couldn't make OO a career for me. I was a captain, but honestly, the schedule at a regional and at a major are two completely different animals. I understand his angst, and so will you once you make it to the regional level, looking to get into a career position.

 

[jhugz]

because a regional is not a career...he isn't going to be able to make it a career. I couldn't make OO a career for me. I was a captain, but honestly, the schedule at a regional and at a major are two completely different animals. I understand his angst, and so will you once you make it to the regional level, looking to get into a career position.

Why can't a regional be a career Dale? Southwest is a regional, so is Allegiant, JetBlue, Spirit, etc...The only difference is QoL and pay. People bash on Horizon because it has a million year upgrade, to be honest though, it's probably the only regional I'd ever go to. Strive and fight to improve the profession instead of finding the magical quick upgrade to get to a legacy career. To be honest I don't feel sorry for anyone waiting for an upgrade at PNCL, Great Lakes, Commutair, etc. You knew the conditions, what did you expect was going to happen if the industry slowed down? Pay to magically become livable? I'm not going into debt to wear the monkey suit and say I fly a jet, wheheeheheh, I did that once already in this industry, not again. If you chose to, don't complain about it.

1.) You may never get to that legacy gig.
2.) It make take you 2x-3x longer then you expected to get to that gig.

 

[Bumblebee]

no they aren't they sell their own tickets, and regionals contract a lower rate to the ticket seller. Now OO is bigger than some of the ones you listed, but it still has to bid less for the lift that the person selling the ticket can do it for. No one can tell SWA that the route they've been flying is going to go to Jet Blue, but they can tell OO that. Horizon is a bit on its own because it is almost like a partnership rather than a contractor I think (could be wrong but that is my perspective.) I never went into SkW with an idea that it was a career, and only considered it for a little while while the kool aid was sweet...before it became rancid to me.

Why can't a regional be a career Dale? Southwest is a regional, so is Allegiant, JetBlue, Spirit, etc...The only difference is QoL and pay. People bash on Horizon because it has a million year upgrade, to be honest though, it's probably the only regional I'd ever go to. Strive and fight to improve the profession instead of finding the magical quick upgrade to get to a legacy career. To be honest I don't feel sorry for anyone waiting for an upgrade at PNCL, Great Lakes, Commutair, etc. You knew the conditions, what did you expect was going to happen if the industry slowed down? Pay to magically become livable? I'm not going into debt to wear the monkey suit and say I fly a jet, wheheeheheh, I did that once already in this industry, not again. If you chose to, don't complain about it.

1.) You may never get to that legacy gig.
2.) It make take you 2x-3x longer then you expected to get to that gig.

 

[Hacker15e]

*ANYONE* who tells you that seniority doesn't matter in this industry or that you should delay getting hired is LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH! "Quick, seniority is everything" is TRUE. It was true in 2006, it was true in 2007, and it is true even today.

Nobody isn't claiming that seniority isn't extremely important to your schedule and QOL as a pilot at an airline -- that's been a well established fact for decade upon decade. It is, of course, "everything" with respect to your day-to-day comfort in that job.

What seniority is not is "everything" with respect to your development of skills and experience as a pilot. Your skills and airmanship as an aviator, and the subsequent decisionmaking and actions that take place in flight because of that airmanship, are far more important than a seniority number.

That's what this entire discussion is about on a macro level.

The objection to the ATP tagline is that it supports short-cutting traditional routes of gaining types and amounts of experience that really prepare a pilot's airmanship to be in charge of 50+ people in an aircraft. This is all against the background understanding that, just because something is legal doesn't necessarily make it smart.

 

[ppragman]

Why can't a regional be a career Dale? Southwest is a regional, so is Allegiant, JetBlue, Spirit, etc...The only difference is QoL and pay. People bash on Horizon because it has a million year upgrade, to be honest though, it's probably the only regional I'd ever go to. Strive and fight to improve the profession instead of finding the magical quick upgrade to get to a legacy career. To be honest I don't feel sorry for anyone waiting for an upgrade at PNCL, Great Lakes, Commutair, etc. You knew the conditions, what did you expect was going to happen if the industry slowed down? Pay to magically become livable? I'm not going into debt to wear the monkey suit and say I fly a jet, wheheeheheh, I did that once already in this industry, not again. If you chose to, don't complain about it.

1.) You may never get to that legacy gig.
2.) It make take you 2x-3x longer then you expected to get to that gig.

This. If I could make a career at a regional, and make a decent wage, I'd go. In a heart beat.

 

[zmiller4]

Oh, it still is. Had I been hired in 2006 instead of 2007 at Pinnacle, I would have been like kellwolf: upgrade in 2008 and build PIC time for 3 years since then. Today, he's getting his resume ready for Southwest and JetBlue. Today, I sit waiting for an upgrade slot still 200 numbers away, with an undetermined effect by the upcoming SLI. *ANYONE* who tells you that seniority doesn't matter in this industry or that you should delay getting hired is LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH! "Quick, seniority is everything" is TRUE. It was true in 2006, it was true in 2007, and it is true even today.

I won't disagree that seniority is tremendously important. A friend of mine got hired by my current airline a month and a half before I met the minimums, and they had stopped hiring just as I got my application in. I spent almost a year at another airline before getting on with my current one. He's been a captain for 4 years, a good chunk of it as a lineholder. I'm on 5th year FO pay and pretty much certainly leaving the industry within the next three months. I can't fathom how big a difference a couple months made.

I don't blame you for doing what was best for your career--but I don't think you were in any way prepared to be an effective member of an airline crew at 200-something hours.

 

[CoffeeIcePapers]

This. If I could make a career at a regional, and make a decent wage, I'd go. In a heart beat.

+1

I'm not even that greedy, really. I just can't work for 25k a year and be gone 20 days a month.

 

[ppragman]

+1

I'm not even that greedy, really. I just can't work for 25k a year and be gone 20 days a month.

Yep. That's exactly it.

 

[msmspilot]

+1

I'm not even that greedy, really. I just can't work for 25k a year and be gone 20 days a month.

It's greedy to say "my skills and training are worth more than what this job is paying"???!?!? Greed requires the desire to an excessive accumulation of wealth. While excessive is certainly subjective, I hardly think that wanting a job that pays better than 50% of the median income in the US is greedy by anyone's book.

 

[kellwolf]

In total, around 550 (give it or take a dozen) have gone from Gulfstream to Pinnacle since the two have coexisted.

Newsflash, that's a lot less than 50% of our pilots. And how many of those Gulfstream guys have moved on? I know of the ones I flew with as an FO.....ONE is still here. The rest have moved on. "Nearly half give or take a couple hundred" doesn't have the nice ring to it, I guess....

 

[CoffeeIcePapers]

It's greedy to say "my skills and training are worth more than what this job is paying"???!?!? Greed requires the desire to an excessive accumulation of wealth. While excessive is certainly subjective, I hardly think that wanting a job that pays better than 50% of the median income in the US is greedy by anyone's book.

All management sees are 100's of resumes piling up on their desk at the current pay rate. The unions haven't done much to force their hand on the issue and we can't expect management to change the status quo on their own. I wish pilots as a group were more united and had better standards for their own profession.

 

[HeyEng]

The issue of trying to get a simulator to replicate the airplane is flight testing. Very rarely is a transport category or business jet goes through the flight regime you'd like to see in the simulator. So without accurate test data, the programmers would simply be guessing as to what the airplane would do in such an envelope regime... And guess what? They will not do that... It opens them up to very expensive litigation. During the simulator certification I took through the FAA, there were several cases where a simulator builder and operator was sued because of incorrect modelling. Some of the cases were as dumb as the runway lights being closer to white than aviation white. There is a huge stink going on right now because of the Delta jet that landed on the taxi way. Do you know what the big stink is? The way LED taxiway lights are modelled in the sim. So, long story short, you can thank the lawyers for limiting what can be done in a simulator.

...and I usually get harassed when I suggest that acro should be part of basic flying training.

I totally agree; your comment about airlines procedurally making things as safe as possible is spot-on, but the follow-on as to how this effects pilot skills goes all the way back to training much earlier in the process.

I recently went through an initial Type class at Flight Safety for a turboprop, and I was amazed at how close to the "warm, chewy center" of the flight envelope they stayed. Even the "unusual attitudes" weren't unusual in any way. When I asked why they wouldn't set up a more extreme attitude -- you know, something unusual -- they said;

1. Without an aerobatic category aircraft and parachutes, you can't do that (duh...this is why we're training in a simulator, right?)
2. The sim doesn't have a flight model that's accurate outside of the normal parameters, so they weren't sure what it would do.

Bottom line, they trained to an extremely conservative portion of the flight envelope. Even though I left there with a Type Rating in the airplane on my certificate, I have no experience whatsoever with even close to the extremes of the flight envelope. Hell, we didn't even actually stall it, but trained and executed recovery at the first indication of an approaching stall.

In the fighter business, our job is to fly airplanes at the edge of the performance envelope -- to not do so means not using parts of the airplane's capability that could cause us to be beat by another aircraft (or whatever we're maneuvering against). We spend dedicated time training to "Advanced Handling Characteristics" -- beyond just approach to stall training or the standard stuff that keeps us smiply safe. We go find the left side of the chart (up and down the lift limit line with accelerated stalls), go find the top of the chart (max G), and even sometimes the right side of the chart (max airspeed/Mach). Although such training is "tactical", it has the collateral benefit of letting pilots actually see the dark corners of the flight envelope and be reasonably comfortable flying the airplane there. Meaning, when something unusual really happens, and you HAVE to max perform the airplane to keep from smacking the dirt or another airplane, that's not the first time you've attempted to max perform. A pilot who is somewhat familiar with that is less likely to over-shoot those limitations (like pulling into an accelerated stall and keeping the yoke buried in a failed attempt to keep from smacking the dirt).

It floors me that the rest of the world doesn't include at least some training (in a sim even, where it's perfectly safe!) in those dark corners and edges of the flight envelope so that the first time the limits are seen, there aren't innocent paying pax in the back while the pilot is trying to figure it out real time.

Sent from my 1989 Motorola StarTAC using Tapatalk

 

[Hacker15e]

All management sees are 100's of resumes piling up on their desk at the current pay rate.

Translation: market sets the price.

So long as applications keep piling up on desks at current wages (and outside of a massive change in pattern collective bargaining methodologies), there's not going to be a change in pay.

 

[Hacker15e]

It opens them up to very expensive litigation.

Valid point...but still not a reason to stop seeking a solution to what is IMHO a huge hole in pilot training and proficiency which could lead to more dead bodies and bent metal.

 

[AeroT]

I think the applicant pool over a 1000 hours has already dried up. Most of my friends getting hired right now are well below a 1000 hours and it seems to get lower every week. My money is on a "how low will the bar go" thread by summer.

My money is on that all the regionals are stockpiling pilots with low time so that they can furlough them later and say oh sorry oil prices are up and we don't need you right now. Then maybe they will call back in a year or so.

 

[CoffeeIcePapers]

Translation: market sets the price.

So long as applications keep piling up on desks at current wages (and outside of a massive change in pattern collective bargaining methodologies), there's not going to be a change in pay.

Yup.

My money is on that all the regionals are stockpiling pilots with low time so that they can furlough them later and say oh sorry oil prices are up and we don't need you right now. Then maybe they will call back in a year or so.

That is what happened in 2007/2008.

 

[ready2fly]

Translation: market sets the price.

So long as applications keep piling up on desks at current wages (and outside of a massive change in pattern collective bargaining methodologies), there's not going to be a change in pay.

Agreed...and I will add to this and some of the other sentiments about this:

It's not just the pilots coming up who are guilty of perpetrating when new pilots think they should submit their qualifications. I cannot remember how many times I heard when coming through, and cannot remember how many times I've said to wannabe airline pilots, even now that I've got 5 years at my airline: "get your resume in NOW! Remember, at the airlines It's all about seniority."

I know that statement got me to apply even though I knew I'd take about a $30K paycut per year (still haven't matched what I made in `04 in my former career).

It's not the airline wannabe's who are solely guilty of flying for crap wages. As stated above, the folks in management know they have potential applicants over a barrel.

Their attitude is "fine if you want to wait until wages increase. You'll lose a lot of seniority and we have thousands who will fly for under our current salaries right now."

We pilots who are "there" are just as much to blame.

Just MHO.
R2F