Originally Posted by
rdavid2792
OK. Hopefully you’re right Army. January would be perfect. Fingers crossed.
Ran into a Piedmont FO in grocery store parking lot. He seemed pretty happy. Said things aren’t great but not that bad either. Same exact story at the rest of the regionals. Local flight school and easy commute, PNS to CLT makes Piedmont work for me.
By military standards, it’s a pretty easy gig. You know your schedule for a month at a time in advance so you can plan your commutes etc. People on the line treat you well and the company is accommodating when you have family issues you need to attend to in training or if something comes up on the line. You’ll fly a lot more in airline world than you will in .mil. There’s also a lot less bs to deal with compared to military life.
By airline standards, life at Piedmont is rough due to the schedule... 4-6 days on, 2-3 days off for a total of 11 days off a month to block 50- 75hours a month with cancellations, displacements etc. Junior FOs to Senior captains all get treated equally as the company uses extensions to cover gaps in mannig caused by training delays, and under accession etc.
Pay is below average. Unless you’re able to get triple premium pay which is few and far between on the FO side of the House. Triple premium is also decreasing on the captain side.
Flow is long. Significantly longer than the 5 years recruitment is advertising. PSA and Envoy both got flow increases but there’s no sign of an increase coming at Piedmont. Piedmont used to have the fastest flow of the three Wholly Owned regionals but without a flow increase that may no longer be the case. Using current attrition rates (8/ month avg over the last year including flow and OTS hires when AA takes flows roughly 10 months a year), withthe size of the pilot group, a new hire could be looking at around a 9 year flow... 12 years with zero outside attrition. That’s pushing Envoy flow timeline. At current expansion rates its 18 months or so until the next flow increase (to 7 per month) from getting a net gain of 125 additional folks on property.
If you get to Piedmont plan on working hard from the day you start flying the line until you leave. Plan on hitting the apps and job fairs hard after you’re off probation and take the next best offer you get. Don’t be one of these folks who leave $1-1.5mil in career earnings on the table because they’ve been on property a couple years and are competitive to leave but are content waiting 4-6 more years for the flow vs applying elsewhere.
As long as you’re willing to work hard and don’t expect strings of days off beyond 3 on a regular basis your transition to Piedmont will go pretty smoothly.