Originally Posted by
embraer
Looking at some of the lines here at Eagle, there are a number of them which are very posh. No overnights, some with only a few, less than 200 hours TAFB, etc... If you live in base and hold those lines...bingo. You have it made.
Throw in a Captain's salary and things can be great.
All valid points, and the two carriers I've worked at, as well as talking to guys at AE specifically, it's not the "norm".
Meaning that at the regional level, the regional/contracted carrier is 100% at the whims of the mainline partners they feed for. The trickle down effects can swing from one side to the other from month to month. Last minute schedule changes, crappy pairing/line build, higher than normal average line value/line divisors, what have you. One month the bid pack can contain lines of flying that are sweet whether you're a commuter OR live in base. The next month, everything goes to crap with nothing but a few commutable 4 days and the resto a hodgepodge of non commutable/multi day garbage. When our biggest base had 500 lines of flying, the amount of good lines was plentiful. Now that it's shrank to less than 300 lines, eh, not so much.
Note, this issue is NOT unique to line bid companies, PBS can be just as crappy as we're finding out from our ASA brethren. Under even the best PBS software, if the pairings suck, all PBS does is award sucky pairings. Under line bid, if the pairings suck, all the scheduling guys can do is build the best lines they can from sucky pairings.
This is making me crave Guinness, lots and lots of Guinness.