Hey Duplicate,
You have made some very insightful and informative posts on here, and they are so good that they deserve their own thread, like "121 vs. 135 advice", or something like that. Just my opinion, but they are good enough to not be hidden in these home based threads.
As far as going to 121 and staying there..... Absolutely! If you are 50 or younger, lucky you! You are in one of the greatest times in history to be a pilot, much unlike my "lost generation" of pilots that came out in 1990's to the Eastern/Pan Am shutdowns followed by the flooding of the market by thousands of furloughed mainline and regional airline pilots.
However, many of us have been there and done that, and for whatever reason have chosen not to return to Part 121. Like many from my era of flying, I have endured 5 furloughs in a 25+ year career.. And for me personally, it is my age and life situation that made me choose to return to Part 135 flying vs. Part 121. I am in my mid-50's and still have 10 good years to do yet another career restart, but I don't want to be the oldest guy in a walker in a LGA or CLT crashpad, or the sort in SDF, MEM, IND, or CVG... In addition, after the Depression of 2008, (It's a recession if your neighbor gets laid off, but a depression if you do), my Wife's career went vertical. With her pay trajectory, there is no way I will surpass her pay trajectory at any Legacy or Tier 1 Cargo carrier. The only way that I could surpass her flying an airplane, is if I went to the sandbox and did ISR flying and never came home, picking every overtime assignment that I could. But with a young son at home, the best thing for our family is to for me work someplace that is very flexible about where you can live and that has a decent schedule. We did a family spreadsheet and we chose flyExclusive. I also left out the fact that I was out of flying for 2.5 years with Cancer, so I needed a place that I could start out of one place and finish in another so I could do my 6 month FAA Cancer screenings. flyExclusive has been amazingly accommodating with that and other things like getting us home before a hurricane hits, or flying me out to where my Wife was when I slipped on the icy TVC ramp and got a concussion. Every carrier has its pluses and minruses, but the above flexibility and empathy are flyExclusive's strong points. In fact, we actually hired pilot from a competitor that actually denied flying him someplace different from his base during a family emergency: They actually told him that they needed a 48 hour notice and a letter from the VP of Flight Ops to be flown to XXX instead of YYY.
Also, many of us came from a Part 135 background prior to our 121 careers, and many of us are better pilots because of it. When I was flying Part 121, if you had handed us an approach to ASE or HCR, the RUUDY 6 Departure out of TEB, etc. we would have been stumped. And I hadn't filed my own flight plan in over 10 years...
www.flightplan.what?, I said...
I am so much better of an airman having flown 91K and Part 135 flying... it's like I got to test my skills again much more than when I was flying my beloved TYS-DFW-SEA-GEG runs for months at a time. With 91K and Part 135 flying, I was so much more challenged every day in a great way that I was never challenged in 121 flying. Having to do my own performance, flight planning, W&B, orchestrating every detail of the flight, was a great and enjoyable challenge. You had to be flexible, and your plans may change multiple times per day, but we make it happen and we do it safely and professionally. Give me a pilot flying single pilot, IFR from Ameriflight, Central Air, Cape Air, Key Lime etc. over a Regional pilot from a pilot training mill who came from a CFI to an RJ... No offense to those folks, but I promise you that the 135 folks got a much more diverse experience coming up and that's not just because that is my background..
So, yes, I would agree with you that getting on at a young age to a Regional with Flow would have been a dream come true 20 years ago for many of us, and I would certainly would have taken it rather through crawling through the broken glass of 1990's Part 135 Automotive, FDX, and UPS carriers. But I am a much better pilot than I would have been if I had never had the opportunity to fly Part 135 or Part 91K, and I don't regret that.
As far as flyExclusive goes, we currently have retired AA and SWA pilots working here, as well as fighter pilots, Netjets pilots who left to start a family business, and we have applicants from AA, SWA, DL, UA, UPS, Academy Grads, Mig and Sukhoi pilots, etc., who are looking to continue their careers at a place that has a decent schedule that allows them to live where they want to. I promise you, Part 135 doesn't have to be the place where careers come to die.. That place used to be MIA or YIP...
