I will offer a slightly different perspective. I was hired much later in a period of steady hiring. I already lived in a large senior base. I spent the first year commuting to a junior base with a fairly easy commute. I only spent A month or two on reserve and dropped as much as I could get away with and picked up trips in the base where I live. I had varying degrees of success with that, but if you stay on open time, you can do a decent job of reducing the number of days that you have to commute. After I year, I barely made it into the base where I live when the hiring stopped. So, I have been on reserve (except when I volunteered to TDY) for 7 months now. I will probably be in reserve for at least another 8 months. Some months, I fly my butt off on reserve, but most months I get called out half the time or less. I tend to prefer flying over reserve, so I usually still pick up as much as I can to fly more and make more. So I average around 7 or 8 days off a month, but I also usually have another 7 or 8 days that I don’t get called out. So I am home 15+ days a month. Other than the one month I chose to TDY, I have spent 5 nights on the road this year, and 3 of those were for training. This schedule beats my previous 135/91k lifestyle by large margins.


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