Originally Posted by
AAfng
I did a whopping 12 months at ABX. I am now at a passenger airline. I went from driving to work to now commuting. I have friends always asking if they should go to an ACMI carrier. I dont know what to tell them.
Amazon is going to keep growing like mad and Omni, K4, and ATI have nice enough contracts now but the thing I dont see is the ability to drop trips. Drop reserve. Work less if needed. Change your schedule, trip trade. Pick up higher paying trips to make more money, not just work extra days. Home basing sounds great until you realize you are gone for 16 days no matter what. Commuting stinks but no schedule flexibility I "think" is worse. Am I missing something? At ABX I was only on reserve but it wasnt bad because I was able to just sit at home until called and they had a FIFO list I could watch.
How is schedule flexibility at your carrier? Isnt everyone just on reserve for X number of days?
Can’t compare all by what happened at ABX. My ACMI has trip trading, and plenty of schedule variety. You mostly will be gone 16 days, but it can be all at once, or in two and even three chunks. Bid what you want. Often the first day on duty is just a call with your scheduled DH to work the next day. That knocks it down to 15 away from home. Kalitta guys have CA’s who did over $500k last year by working the system. Fly your reserve days and you’ll make more without working extra days. We have both lines with scheduled flying and reserve lines. We have special carve out programs that even come with higher guarantees (80 hour instead of 64), and another that is basically scheduled PAX service with published hard lines.
ABX is a poor example to wages, working conditions and quality of life at most ACMI’s in my opinion.