View Single Post
Old 01-31-2015, 06:22 AM
  #27  
ZapBrannigan
Furloughed Again?!
 
ZapBrannigan's Avatar
 
Joined APC: Aug 2007
Position: Boeing 737
Posts: 4,781
Default

I'll reiterate what I said before. When I left part 121 to take a job flying for a Fortune 10 flight department it was the best kept secret in aviation. Good pay, terrific schedule, lots of time off. The department had never furloughed, the equipment and people were great and the flying was easy. But the dirty little secret in corporate is that there is no contract to protect quality of life. So it doesn't take much for that great schedule to go to awful in the blink of an eye. In our case it took the layoff of 10% of the pilots out of seniority order. This created a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It also understaffed the department to the point that days off were rescinded and vacations cancelled.

I was just about to turn 40 and had been with the department for almost a decade. I was on a light jet fleet. It's true that corporate pilots can sometimes go from Captain to captain when starting at a new company - but typically only in highly desirable fleets like Challengers, Globals, and Gulfstreams. It isn't as common in light jets where pilots are a dime a dozen.

I worried what would happen if I were in the next round of layoffs (there are no recalls in part 91 corporate) when I was 50 or 55 or 60 and not ready to retire.

It was time to go back to a system that wasn't based on whether you wee in the good old boys club, but where you knew the rules to the game based on where your seniority number fell.

There are a lot of things I miss about corporate flying, but don't mistake that to mean that I regret my decision to go back to 121. The only thing I regret is not doing it sooner.
ZapBrannigan is offline