Originally Posted by Twister

All -

A word to the wise. I asked the question maybe 10 pages ago or so about what the standard ROE was for how the drop gets disseminated/dispersed. Consensus answer was that they tell you mid-morning and then you choose right after lunch.....after you'd had a few hours to talk and think things through.

Well......not always. Those of us who started indoc yesterday (4 Apr) were told the drop about 0900 and the jets were chosen/handed out at 1010. That's an hour and 10 minutes and of that 1+10 we had 2 SHORT breaks (one 10 minutes and one 5 minutes) to phone a friend. And.....the cell phone reception in the indoc room was spotty.

Good luck with that.

My takeaway to pass on to you is if you care at all about what you fly or where you will be based and if you think you will have a choice, you REALLY need to study up on the pros and cons of each aircraft AND take a very hard look at how you expect to commute to each junior base. Get into Travelocity, Orbitz, etc and look at how many flights leave your hometown a day, when they leave, what size/type aircraft (for instance, you can't reserve jumpseats on RJs) how many legs to get to your domicile, etc. And then the same for coming home. If you live in your domicile, or will soon, obviously this is a non-issue, but of the 36 in this class, I bet at least 2/3 plan on commuting. Probably a good idea to get into the Lakeside graphics seniority charts and see approximately how long it will take to leave an undesired domicile/bid into where you really want to be. Do this before indoc so you can (hopefully) choose wisely if you are forced to choose very quickly after the drop is revealed.

Good luck to everyone!