Just a little of Intel I was able to gather from the open house last Saturday.

The email invitations were not randomly sent. They were sent to those qualified applicants whom always happen to miss the cut by a bit every time. As it was explained to me, every time Rocky gives the green light to interview/bring, say, 300 pilots on board, they go to their pilot credentials system and pick the top 300 guys from that list of 4000. The top 300 guys tend to be the checkairmen, TRE, APDs, Chief pilots, safety inspectors, astronaut, peace novel price recipients, etc, basically the top of the line, according to them. By doing that, they have continuously missed out on qualified applicants who may have missed the top 300ish applicant selection window every time, but whom could also be “perfectly qualified, good guys”, as they said.

So they decided for the event on Saturday to send email invites to those qualified applicants who regularly miss the “top tier” window and give them some face time. The next 400 applicants who were just under the top tier on the list were brought over to the open house for the following purpose:

1) Go over resume and make recommendations/observations.
2) Give the applicant an idea on how to improve chances of getting an interview.
3) The most important one: to have your resume placed in the “I like him/her” box or in the “I DONT like him/her” box.

That was the info given during the one on one to several of us that were there. It also may explain why there’s a separate application window for those that attended the event on Thursday and another general application window for the rest of the applicants.

For whatever it’s worth, all the other attendees whom I managed to speak with or overheard speaking to others, were in the vast majority long time regional captains, also a few part 135 captains, cargo captains on shady operators, expat captains, 1 lcc FO, a few Alaska FOs and a ton of Atlas guys.

To be taken with a pound of salt.
FS