Originally Posted by
Elevation
I fly at Atlas which has a gateway program similar to but not entirely equal to home-basing. The value of home-basing depends on your minimum standard of living.
If you are comfortable in a crappy crash-pad at $150/month, the value of home basing is $1800/year. If you’d be getting yourself a $100/night hotel prior to a trip, the value would be roughly $6000/year. Same math applies with your stadnards regarding jump-seating to work v. positive space travel.
Me, I am used to living pretty poorly. I’d rather have the higher pay rate and retirement offered elsewhere.
You're leaving out all the wasted time jumpseaters spend missing flights, spending time planning their commute, finding flights and connecting flights to get where they're going. When I commuted I used to be looking at loads at least a day in advance (on my day off) trying to decide which flights looked best.
Used to have to have an airport car for leaving in the parking lot that could take a few dings and not be noticed in the dents, and had to pay $100 a month for the parking lot.
Home Basing is huge. No stress, ever. No wasting valuable family time at home trying to plan getting to work. No looking for at least 2 flights that get there in time. No standing at the gate wondering if any of their own guys are going to show up and bump you out of the jumpseat.
You get your travel notice, pick your seat on your phone app, then go back to playing with your kids. Then your wife drops you at the airport and off you go. Not having to go to a car lot and take a shuttle to the airport saves another 30 minutes each way. You build your frequent flyer miles up fairly quickly, so you soon are always boarding in group 1, or being upgraded.
Just the wasted time alone from not having to jumpseat adds up to serious time yearly that could have been used flying overtime, or spending more time with the family.
It makes the job very stress free. I used to joke (when I was a commuter) that the hardest part of my job was getting to/from work. Now the hardest part is remaining sharp and current, since you just never seem to get enough landings or stick time. I think the average is 30-50 hours of flight time per month currently.