Schedule
We work 8 days on, 6 days off. Pilots can live anywhere within 2 hours of an airport served by Delta. The day before you start work, you get an email with dead head and/or rental car information about getting you from your home to the aircraft. Once at the aircraft, you generally remain with it and the other pilot for the entire 8 days. We are expected to be within 2 hours of the aircraft at all times in case a pop up trip comes. 95% of the time, you know what your are doing 24-48 hours out.
A normal day is working a 3 hour flight with passengers, then repoing the aircraft to get it in position for the next flight. That can be anywhere from a 30 minute flight to across the country. My last rotation only had 11 flights over 8 days, so most of the time the schedule is easy and includes a few days “off.” I had 48 hours in Key West, and was even home for one night (I live in our MX base). It is rare to fly every day of the rotation, but it does happen occasionally. One nice thing is most people don’t want to fly in the middle of the night, so our flying is done between 7am and 10pm.
Hotels
DPJ uses API to schedule hotels, so we stay at the typical Hilton, Marriott, and IHG properties. [/B]
Pay
Pay is all over the place at DPJ. Since there has been so many management teams and there are so many fleets and different pilot groups (core and managed). One Captain on the Excel might be making $80,000 while another is making $60,000). As of right now, all new FOs are paid $40,000 and all light and mid PICs are paid $60,000. Per diem is $1.88 an hour away from your home. The pay is a big draw back at DPJ, but they will be addressing it soon.
Flight Benefits
DPJ employees get Delta flight benefits and travel at SB3. We are not in CASS so we can’t jumpseat.
Minimums
DPJ will hire people with 1500 hours, no turbine, or not type ratings. To upgrade, you need 3,000 hours for insurance. We fly around 500 hours a year, so if you come here with 1500 hours, you will take a long time to upgrade.
Upgrade
Upgrades are done by a combination of seniority and merit. The check airman of each fleet have a list of all the FOs who meet the flight time requirements to upgrade. Then they discuss which ones are ready. They try to make sure to fly with every periodically to see how they are progressing. The check airman are all great people who are too busy to hold grudges and hold back upgrades for personal issues. The pilot group is too big for them to have “good old boys club” and they are too short of captains for them to hold back upgrades. Upgrades are around 2-6 months right now.
I think this should be enough to get a useful thread started.