Look people, here is the bottom line for anyone wanting to come here.

It's a regional airline with regional airline problems. Mgt is not commuter friendly so you really need to live in base when working here. We have many pilots that commute but it's a struggle for them to deal with and really not worth the hassle. Commuting on reserve will drive you to drink. You'll see home less than 7 days a month.

Once you get into 3rd, 4th year pay, live in base, hold a line either as an FO or CA then it's really not a horrible job. But the road to get there is immensely frustrating and well beyond that of other regionals that are currently hiring.

Even once you get into a PDT sweetspot it's a day to day struggle to stay positive. Mgt makes it this way. We have a management team that is extremely dedicated to the "management by intimidation" philosophy more so than many other carriers. Not to mention the fact that the folks that run this airline are collectively the biggest group of morons this side of South Park, CO.

Our future and I mean our near future within 1 year is very uncertain. We may prevail, or we may all be applying to our local State Unemployment office for 30% of our pay very soon. It could go either way.

There are very strong aspects to our contract but the language is so vague in some areas and full of "the company may", "the company might", " the company will try" that it just wants to make you punch something. They "invent" contract language interpretations more or less on a daily basis especially when it comes to reserve F/O's. Per capita we have one of the longest list of active/unresolved grievances in the industry and there is virtually no movement there.

For senior people it's not horrible if you live on base. But for junior people it will be a struggle. These guys love to fire probies if they fart in the wrong direction.

Our new hire wash out rate usually averages at around 30 to 40%. Training isn't impossible but they seem to have gotten into a pattern of looking for reasons to fail you vs. finding a reason to pass you. That's a whole other discussion with plenty of history on this thread. The Dash is a systems intensive aircraft with a medium level of automation. You WILL struggle in training if you do not have a very high level of raw data "six pack" instrument flying skills. They will eat you alive down there if all you bring to the table is G1000 or similar systems avionics/instrument experience. Some people that just pick things up really fast squeak through but this is the caveat that causes a lot of training wash outs and the training dept. has zero sympathy for this issue. The Dash is a very easy aircraft to fly once you know it well as it's pretty forgiving in a stick and rudder sense. But it will kick your butt learning to get there if you've got a weak scan or zero to little analog panel experience.

The biggest thing you need to consider is that you get to deal with all this and more....just to log SIC turboprop time. If PDT was an a awesome place to work then to heck with the equipment. But...it really isn't. Go fly jets somewhere else...you'll be happier and so will your resume in the long run.

There is a reason some of us used to have stickers on our flight cases that said "Piedmont Airlines: The cure for hope." Yeah...mgt made us take those off under threat of discipline.