It used to be a much better airline. I would even go so far as to say it was fun to be there. Maybe a short story will bring understanding to the bitterness that some people feel.
When the pilot shortage started, the supply of new hire captains suddenly dried up and that's when things started to get ugly. A lot of captains pitched in and covered the open flying and put some decent coin in their pockets. Things were still manageable at that point, I'd say it was 2012/2013-ish.
Then they opened Montana. While it makes the company a good profit, it strained all of the resources, primarily due to this crazy idea that pilots could live in places like Wolf Point. (They did, but ask them what they were sleeping on.) Bases had to close, captains got bumped in order to feed Montana. Anyone who had the silly dream of retiring from Cape Air as a captain on the Key West run was left to dream.
Attrition continued, and nothing was/is plugging the hole. The union and management had this bright idea to "renegotiate" the contract a few seasons before the due date in 2016. They negotiated like it was the Great Regional Furlough of 2008 and made a lot of lateral changes, not really improving conditions, instead just rearranging the contract language. Raises were scheduled for the length of the contract at about the same lukewarm rate as the previous contract. FOs received a minimal pay tweak as well. Provisions were made to reduce duty days by generally less than 1 hour, while squeezing breaks to the minimum in most markets. Montana pilots are no longer to be based in out stations but in Billings. They acted as if this were a huge favor when it should have been that way from the start. By the way, the union reps went to great lengths to court the MT pilots' YES vote while ignoring other regions' input for improvement.
Meanwhile, the captain situation became critical. The strategy of recruiting many FOs in order to upgrade them to captains became the company's last hope. It is failing. Management gets upset that FOs leave when they get their 1500 hours, claiming that they used the company for the flight time. Having flown with a lot of these FOs, I can tell you that most of them would have kept their word, but they were treated poorly. Some of them spend 4-5 months in training, waiting at the Holiday Inn up to 2 weeks for a training flight. When they finally are put on line, scheduling and Ops don't make the provisions to ensure that the FO will fly. I see FOs scheduled for over 20 hours of block every week only get 6. The worst part about this is that it is exacerbates the captain shortage by prolonging the upgrade while captain attrition accelerates.
The FOs are leaving because time-wise they are being put seriously behind in their careers. But the HYA and BOS senior management pilots are still stuck in the past. They think that a monetary bond is going to solve this issue as if it were 2008. This lack of forward thinking is choking this once fun airline.