Originally Posted by DoSomePilotStuf

The deal right now is there is a lot of transition happening. The company is very short on pilots and it’s the middle of summer and peak demand. Therefore pilots are being overworked and stretched to the limit. Pilots that are on reserve here are flying their butts off. So compare that to regionals where pilots are flying 10 hrs a month or less and it should be a no brainer for you. However for someone with years of seniority (of which there are a lot) who are used to the highest QOL in the industry (which XJT has historically had) and you end up with a lot of complaints. Also a lot of people left the company as it was shrinking over the past several years. When a company shrinks upgrade times go high and so a lot of people felt they were better off starting at the bottom of a different seniority list. Now there is tons of flying with tons of growth potential, which has led to the overworked scenario.

Going forward the attrition should stabilize, the workload should return to normal and the training department should be able to turn out pilots at a faster rate. Upgrade times will come down to 2 years or less one way or another. Although the most recent captain award was to an FO who had been here 3.5 years, there are only 400 pilots between that pilot and a brand new hire, of which 200 have joined since Jan 1. To simplify, you need 800 new hires to upgrade 400 FOs. If they can get to 60 per month getting out of training (work left to do here but they are building the foundation) then 800/60= 13.33 months. In other words, come now and as soon as you hit 1000 hrs you will upgrade. And because we are short handed and spread thin you will get 1000 hrs here as fast or faster than anywhere else. Definitely much faster than Endeavor.

Add in upper 1/3 pay, industry leading benefits and commuter policy and I can’t imagine why you would pass the place up. Just remember when you sign up to fly for a regional the idea is to be stepped on and run over. It’s like that everywhere. Bottom line, get in NOW. Get on the front end of the wave, not the back end! (SkyWest, Republic, Endeavor)