Originally Posted by piloco

if you are at 1200 and your goal is to fly for the airlines, just WAIT the last few hours you have to build to get 1500.

life at ameriflight:
"you're home every night" - you actually start work anywhere from 5-7am and don't get home again usually till 7-8pm. just enough time for dinner and sleep. So how much were you REALLY home?? I will admit the weekends off is probably the best part of the whole gig. compared to a regional, I've been home a lot more (actually home during normal hours) than I ever was at ameriflight. Of course, gone a few weekends here and there but if your goal is a major airline, that's unavoidable in the long run.
ALSO. ameriflight life gets boring. it's really repetitive since you fly to the same city or two EVERY DAY. while doing so you spend way too much time at an outstation and get very little flight time.
At a regional you will not serve the same destination every day. yes, there are the more frequented destinations, but it will not get old nearly as fast as ameriflight will! you will also stay at nicer accomedations than ameriflight puts you at.

Benefits:
for this I will focus on flight benefits.
Now I understand not all pilots got into the profession due to free (and reduced) flights, but for others it is a big deciding factor.
while at Amerifight we were allowed jumpseat on Southwest. (I hear that now it includes ups, seabourne, mokulele, and spirit?). Anyways the point is, if you're married or have kids, WHO CARES who YOU can fly on, ameriflight does not and cannot get benefits for your wife/husband and kids. so sure, YOU flew for free (domestic only! so all your international plans are non existent!) but what about your family? also with a mon-fri when are you even supposed to fly? Friday night to Sunday?? what about longer trips?
at regionals I as well as my wife and Family ALL have benefits. we can ALL go and enjoy our domestic AND international benefits. that's not to say you might not still buy a ticket here and there like during holidays when non rev travel is nearly impossible (but not fully. I still managed to make 3 domestic trips last thanksgiving/Christmas season).

Training:
let's face it, ameriflight training is a "train yourself" type of thing. you show up to indoc and it's a week of cover everything in no particular order and don't bother asking what's on the test. they don't prep you, you prep you. I know that people these days see that as a problem but it's time for them to face it. things are never going to go back to "the good old days" when you can give young adults a book and they take care of it. these days it's the airlines job to train new hires and that's the way it's going to be. if ameriflight wants to keep talking about the past and how much better it used to be, they need to suck it up because it's not ever going back to those days. Now it's the airlines job to adjust to the decrease in performance of applying applicants. adjust their training even if it ends up taking longer to get them to standards they should be at. The new pilots will not adjust to the airlines anymore. so either pick out the few that are still like "the good old days" and keep quiet about how you can't find enough qualified/quality pilots to fill vacancies, or adjust the training schedule. It is not, unfortunately, going back to the old
days. it's time to adjust.
ameriflight just doesn't have the training department they think they do.
Regionals will have a longer training period than ameriflight (amf is usually 3-5 weeks depending on the plane). A regional will spend a week on indoc, and up to 3 weeks on systems! then up to 3 weeks on sim! this is why regional training was so easy! sure it's baby steps but it's paid better and who cares? at least you know you can pass. Also at ameriflight you hear more profanity and not work appropriate jokes than at a regional. we all do it, but regionals are more professional about it and keep it entirely out of the training environment. for comparison sake, training at ameriflight felt like going through a California public school and going through a regional is like showing up to your 400 level college course (as far as professionalism and materials to use. this does not reflect the material as far as easy or not).

pretty much think about it. is instructing really THAT BAD that you can't hold off another 300 hours? or even another 700 for those going for emb fo?? depends where you instruct, 700 isn't even another year! and 300 is only 3-4 months?
also think about it this way. should another tragedy to aviation occur, would you rather be stuck at amf for the next 8-10 years while the industry isn't hiring, or would you rather be stuck at a regional where you will eventually (not year 1 or 2, but later) make noticeably more money and have a better quality of life?

that's my 2 cents. knowing what I know now, would I have spent a year at ameriflight? simple...no. it's even been a while since I've been there and I still try and save younger pilots from making that mistake.