I've been here 4 years and I am considered to be a senior FO in one of our larger bases, ie top 20%. In my opinion, the larger base probably has better schedules possible. In fact, I think each base is almost like its own mini airline. Once you are in your desired base, general seniority becomes less important, its more about base seniority.

I typically bid low hours. Usually I drop a day or two as well to get down to about 60-65 hours per month (about 10-12 days per month of work). In general I work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday with Thurs-Sun off, sometimes no Tuesdays. I've been doing this each month for almost 2 years. I could upgrade right now but will wait so I am not at the bottom of the captain list. Being junior here can be painful with how the company can move you around, something we call TDY. If you are not familiar with allegiant TDY its a whole other topic.

I'm not here for the money, we don't make what the legacy airlines make. The real benefit to working here is the out and back nature of our schedules as I'm sure you know. I wouldn't trade it for more money, in fact I don't know how you put a price on being home every night in the airlines. I'm too spoiled, if allegiant ever went out of business or merged and the out and back structure went away, I would just call it a career and change my focus more towards my other activities. Having said that, working here does allow you to cast your net into other waters to derive other income. We have all kinds of pilots here doing all sorts of stuff outside of flying.

The last thing I will say is the maintenance is now on par with what most pilots I think would say is good or acceptable maintenance. I say this comparing current allegiant maintenance with working at two previous regional airlines. When I come to work, 99% of the time the airplane gets out on time. In my base I would estimate 60% of the time there is no deferral on the airplane. When there is a deferral its usually just one item. Occasionally you will see an airplane with 2 or 3 deferrals. But it wasn't always like this. There was a time when whatever bad press the company received from maintenance problems was very much deserved in my opinion. They recognized they had to change the way they were doing things because something bad was going to happen and they did. Also, eliminating the MD80 solved alot of maintenance headaches as well. With the MD80, although I've never flown it, I imagine much of the maintenance problems weren't even discovered until you got in the air. With the Airbus, you know when you have a problem many times before you even push back with its more advanced monitoring.