arthur106

I had posted this in an existing thread already, but I thought I would start a new thread so it is more easily accessible to anyone doing a web search.

I resigned after a week. Here is an account of my experience, good and bad. I'm not telling anyone to necessarily stay away from the company, I'm just giving an account of my experience that you can use in conjunction with other research to make an informed decision.

BAD: (Point 2 is why I resigned)

1.) On my second day of real flying after completing the checkout flights, I had a partial engine failure. I told a customer to transition from an ascent into a decent. The customer got a little too excited and we ended up pulling ~0 G's for about a second--no more. The engine sputtered out almost completely and for a second or two things got pretty quiet. The power slowly came back and the engine was vibrating quite a bit. It didn't come back completely, we were only able to maintain 1950-2000 rpm in level flight. I did all my checks (carb heat, primer, ignition, etc.) and couldn't find the cause. We turning back towards the airport and I discovered that leaning the mixture resulted in immediate rpm increase. It was odd, as I've never had such a sensitive mixture control nob. Pulling it out just a hair resulted in a ~200 rpm increase and pulling it a hair further killed the engine. We were able to make it back to the field without incident. After landing and shutting down the engine, we did a runup and achieved 2200 static rpm ("normal" for this plane). The "boss" (will go unnamed) supposedly looked at it and said there's nothing wrong with it. I didn't make a fuss of this, as I'm really no expert, but as a mechanical engineer something about this doesn't sound "fine".

2.) As soon as I arrived, management changed the way planes were assigned. Rather than a pilot "owning" a plane for a day, we rotated planes. You'd be lucky to fly the same one twice in one day. This brought up the concern of keeping track of fuel. Before, ground crews would fill it to tabs, the pilot would (should) verify this, and then they can keep track of air time and have a pretty good idea of how much fuel is left. With the new system, we were expected to trust ground personnel to keep track of fuel. There were two main points brought up about this. 1.) You're blindly trusting the ground personnel actually filled up the tanks and that the pilot(s) before you verified this. It's not unimaginable for this to go wrong. 2.) You're also counting on ground personnel to keep track of air time properly. In my short time there, they already screwed this up once. They told me there wasn't enough fuel left for a 23 minute flight when I still had ~20 gallons.

At a monthly pilot meeting, another pilot brought this up when the boss asked us if we had anything to bring up. All he asked is that we keep fuel sticks in the plane so that we can have a better way to gauge how much fuel is left. The boss somehow took offense to this, and crucified this pilot in front of everyone. The tirade lasted about 5 minutes, so I can't recall everything, but here are some excerpts: "You're a low-time 400 hour pilot and I have XXXX hours. I'm not going to stoop down to your level, you'll have to come up to mine!", "We do so much for you guys, you should just trust the system we have in place, it works." Now, keep in mind that we all had the same concern, but everyone else kept their mouths shut because they were cowards. I spoke up but was able to avoid most of the boss's wrath.

The next evening, me and this other guy are at dinner and he told me that the boss had requested to see him the next morning. He said that he thought he was going to bee terminated. I told him that there's no way he could be fired for that--all he did was respectfully make a suggestion based on a legitimate safety concern at the proper place and time. Keep in mind that this guy didn't really have a history of causing trouble. The only thing I was able to gather by talking to other pilots was that he once refused to fly because he wasn't comfortable with the weather (see below). I decided that I he was going to get fired for this "offense", then I'd resign.

The next morning, he calls me to tell me that he was terminated "for not knowing the fuel burn of a pa-28-140". He apparently told the boss "I know the fuel burn, it's 6-8 gph", at which point the boss said, "you can keep your job if you keep your mouth shut and don't start any trouble". This made it abundantly clear in my mind that I didn't want to work here. When I went to resign, the boss threatened me saying this would me on my PRIA record for 5 years.

GOOD:

Honestly, if it weren't for this one guy, I'd love the company. A lot of the employees are family and it's a tight-knit community. For all the complaints I've made above, the maintenance really isn't all that bad. The boss had been making changes recently specifically to ensure the planes have more hangar time for MX without affecting flight schedules. He's a very compitent, smart guy but the problem was that he as an arrogant a**hole would wasn't willing to listen to the guys actually flying the planes everyday. The story above also makes me question his integrity.
The company will also pay for half of your scuba certification. The waters around Saipan and Tinian are truly world class.
You'll start out doing discover flights for tourists which is amazing. A lot of them are cute girls in their 20's from China. (The Chinese don't really don't have GA, so it's super cool to them). Anyway, as a young guy wearing a pilot uniform and taking them on tour flights, they were ALL OVER ME. I've already got a significant other, but if you're a young, single guy, you can really have a blast over there!