Well, for me anyway:
- i was trapped at a dying regional and managed to escape a year before the ship went down.
- first year at Atlas, including 4 months of meager training pay, paid more than I ever made at the regionals, except the one year I was a captain for 8 months, and that wasn't far off
- i have more time at home at Atlas than I ever did at the regionals. it's almost silly.
- even when i'm working, I fly on average @ 40 hours a month and have lots more time to enjoy my layovers, and of course one leg is a huge QOL improvement over 4-5 legs a day
- when i flew corporate, i loved wondering where i might be headed next whenever the phone rang, but hated not ever having hard days off. at the regionals, i liked having a schedule, but after a while it was the same old, same old. this is the best of both worlds.
- being gone 17 days (rare for me, so far) can wear on the wife and kids, but when i'm home, i'm a lot more plugged in than when i did the 4 on/3 off 121 schedule.
- the no-stress commute is HUGE to me, easily my biggest source of stress in the 121 world. buddy of mine has been at DAL for 13 years, also on the 767 in JFK. he's still sweating the commute every week. can't hold Europe anymore. Does mostly transcons or Africa. Caribbean when he's lucky.


don't get me wrong, i know the majors would pay me a lot more, (hopefully). I know their bennies/retirement are way better than ours. but the idea of commuting on reserve doesn't exactly have me salivating. Nor does being junior forever living in base. my buddies keep telling me they'll retire 60 percent of their pilot group in 10 years. I hope they're right, but that's a best-case scenario and i see their management taking steps to, if not prevent it, at least degrade the job further. i like that that we can compete in a global sandbox, instead of just the US passenger market.

So far, it's a win/win for me. Lots of guys gave up $100k+ jobs as senior RJ captains to come here, too. I'd be curious to hear them chime in as well.