For the prospective pilots interested in Southwest, anyone that tries to sell you:
- our balance sheet
- the "culture"
- the "never furloughed" spiel
- the domiciles
- the scope clause
- the vacation rules
- the reserve rules
- the number of days away from home...
you look them straight in the eye and tell them that by coming to Southwest:
- you will lag your legacy peers in hourly rates.
- you cannot be happy being an FO for the better part of your career, and a 15-year upgrade because of a young pilot group is a non-starter.
- you will be treated like garbage by the company should you go out on medical and you don't want to subject your family to it.
- you will never fly a widebody here.
- you will be stuck flying that clacked-out, uncomfortable and loud POS 737 for the rest of your career.
- you will miss out on Frontier with their new TA, JetBlue, and Spirit with their new contracts as are all much better options with much quicker upgrade than Southwest, and we aren't even talking about legacies.
In the end, that 4th stripe and the ability to brag about the highest hourly rates in the world is what it's all about... at least on APC.
