Originally Posted by
Redstone256
Thanks for the info TallFlyer.
A couple more, if you don't mind: How is pay structured? By flight hour / by duty hour / salary? What about route selection/assignment? Do pilots get to bid on routes based on seniority or are you assigned whatever route needs filling out of training then that one is yours until another one opens up?
If pay is per hour, and routes chosen by seniority, I imagine the longest/highest paying routes are held by the most senior pilots while the FNG's get the shortest ones?
Piston pay is currently straight salary. The numbers on the APC profile are correct. We can request certain runs or a day off and management usually helps us out but aside from that route assignment and schedule are completely management's discretion. Usually the FNGs will spend some time doing MCK because that requires a 5 hour drive on both Saturday and Monday if you live in DEN. Aside from that the other two piston runs out of DEN are half day runs so you're back in DEN around 0930 and done for the day.
All that said, I'm doing MCK this weekend so go figure. Next week I have one day of standby and two days on our all day run out of APA. So, light week overall.
The 404s have a little more stability as they're 4 day runs, usually with a three day weekend every week. Ocassionally they'll do some flying on Mon or Sat but it seems pretty rare for them.
All of this is subject to change as the company is trying to move over to a hour + guarantee type of system. We'll see how that works.