Originally Posted by wrxpilot

At SkyWest it's 5 years to upgrade on the Brasilia, and we are starting to see some attrition. About 20 people left in January alone. Since I was hired 10 months ago, I've moved up about 100 spots, and there are about 400 people below me.

I'm not one to preach about a looming pilot shortage (there won't be one), but the current time to upgrade is due to a double whammy of Age 65 and the recession. Clearly the time to upgrade is going to go down, it's just a matter of how much. Best case (IMO), it will eventually be 2-3 years to upgrade here. Sure it could be longer, but there is currently no data to support that viewpoint.

As far as doing something before the regionals, I don't understand that argument if your goal is to be at the majors. If you head off to AMF for 3 years and then over to SkyWest or somewhere else for another 3 years, I just don't see you being ahead of somebody that just went to SkyWest in the first place. This is coming from a guy that went and did a bunch of other crap before coming to SkyWest... Even though that allowed me to do some pretty interesting stuff and get a jet type, I'm still sitting right seat in a Brasilia instead of being in the left seat.

Now if your goal is to simply explore several different career paths within aviation in order to decide what you really want to do (or to simply have more options with charter/corporate), then by all means head over the AMF and get some 135 experience. That is essentially what I did, so at least the airline stink might wash off if I try to jump back to the charter/corporate world.

As far as which method is the best, nobody here knows that unless they have access to a time machine.