Originally Posted by Celeste

I'm already seeing this where I'm instructing. Our group of CFI's is relatively low time. The university is well aware of the fact that we aren't able to go anywhere because of new hiring minimums, so all of a sudden this semester we are required to work a lot of extra hours. We are now required to work 6 days per week minimum (if our students get behind because of wx we are supposed to come in on our day off but still have to show up on normal days regardless of weather, and our 'normal' work day got extended another hour (and with night flights we work even longer hours). Since we teach LOTS of sim and ground, we are only getting 250-300 hours of flight time per year (maybe we'll be up to 350 with the extra hours we are working), so many of these CFI's will be around for management to abuse for the next 3-5 years.

I really shouldn't complain because I have one of those coveted salaried CFI jobs. But when management advised us of the new policies, we inquired about how they could have us work all of the extra hours for the same pay and the answer was "We get resumes all of the time, we can always replace you if you don't like it." We figure that with the hours we are working it comes out to about $8.50/hour.

Maybe if I have a pessimistic view, but what I see happening is that instead of putting up with a year or two of crappy CFI pay and QOL, and then a rough first two years of low regional FO pay, I will just end up drudging through 4-5 years of it of awful CFI pay, followed by at least the same first two years of suck at the regionals.