Originally Posted by
Skyvector
I wish you the best of luck, but you are acting like you just discovered oil on the surface of the moon.
You are not charting unknown waters here. Everybody networks. Everybody attends job fairs. Everybody waits 3 hours in line for a 5 minute handshake with a mainline recruiter. Everybody collects stacks of recommendation letters. None of this is new, and none of it gets you any closer to a mainline job. Sure, it beats doing nothing. But it's akin to spinning your car's wheels in the mud.
The only way to truly increase your chances is if you are part of the friends and family plan. Assuming you don't have any military flight time. Other than that, you are just one out of thousands. And those other thousands are also networking and getting their face out there.
Too many of us think we are doing something nobody else is doing. That is a residual effect of our jobs. We sit in the cockpit with either a Captain or an FO but never work directly with another person who is our direct peer. So you fly around thunderstorms perfectly, make smooth landings, great radio calls, etc....and after a while you begin to get it in your head you are the best at what you do and nobody else can do it as well. You don't have another FO sitting next to you doing the same job for you to compare with. Or another Captain if that is your position.
That spills over into other areas of life. So you network and do a bunch legwork to get that mainline interview. You begin to think you are the only one doing it. You get your letters together and polish your resume and think nobody is doing it as well as you are.
Most pilots will spend years trying their best to get out of the Regionals...PIC or no PIC. An eventual job with an LCC like Frontier will be more likely to happen than United or Delta. And even then that will take a good 5 years of Regional flying to materialize. Some may get lucky, sure. Happens all the time. That doesn't mean that we should all count on a large heaping of luck to move on. If you have the opportunity to work for an airline that has a true flow, and that flow is WORKING as advertised or better....that would be a better choice than going to work for an independent Regional with no flow and rolling the dice.
This isn't a salesman trying to B.S. a prospective mark out of his own decision....or being "negative" about any other path but signing on and becoming junior at HIS airline which has a flow-through that is NOT a "roll of the dice" ?
On one hand you guys all claim the Envoy flow is just a back-up plan and something "nice to have in your back pocket" if the traditional methods of advancement in the industry don't pan out and then when a pilot does exactly that, i.e., successfully go to where THEY may want to, you belittle that as a foolish move because it isn't to where YOU think they should go (to Envoy and then AA via a supposedly certain flow-through) and THAT is "rolling the dice" ?
Good lord, we've pole-vaulted into the surreal. I guess when a tenacious salesmen grabs on, he doesn't let go............