Originally Posted by
aviatorhi
Thanks for the info. That's quite a brutal pay cut for the first year. Second year basically doubles it though?
Two more questions popped to mind. About how long to get off reserve and onto one of those 5-day trip lines? And while relatively unimportant to many I am wondering what the flying culture is like... Basically, does the other guy get nervous if you fly manually?
3-4 months reserve time right now seems average. However, with planned consistent hiring of 24/month, that may drop. 5 day lines are hard to hold but occasionally a 5 day trip drops into open time. The common problem with 5 days right now is a lot are built with a turn on the front or back of them. For whatever reason, someone usually ends up splitting off the SLC turn and erasing several hours of rig pay. Now that 30 hour 5 day trip is worth 24. Same goes with 4 days that have 30 hour layovers built into them. That's just the ugly nature of our trip splitting part of the contract.
I fly most of the time with automation off. No one really cares as long as you can fly a stable approach and not scare the ever-living-**** out of everyone on board. You'll find a lot of CA fly with the automation at its lowest level.