Originally Posted by
MrAviator180
Good evening ladies gentlemen,
I am shopping for a regional. 1550TT. 680 turbine, with 200 some odd of it being 135 PIC. Have some Q’s.
How far out are class dates? Are you still sharing hotel rooms during training? (From what I understand they’re 2 separate rooms, in a room, not like your standard double queen)??
How is the pilot group and morale at SkyWest?
How does management handle it if you miss a commute? How many times will they allow it before you get shown the door?
How long did it take to start being able to pick trips you wanted/actually liked?
i understand these are loaded questions that may yield some very different answers. Just trying to get a general idea.
I'll just provide a few inputs I guess. Morale is pretty good. Its worse on the captain side because they have to fly more, cant drop trips etc. But the company is very stable, don't really have to worry about losing a bunch of flying and being shown the door like some other regionals.
If you're on the CRJ, reserve time will be minimal. DFW and ATL have the longest reserve times, but still no more than 5 months after IOE. Any other junior base will be reserve maybe a month or two. You can fly a lot and upgrade relatively quickly if you want, around 18 months from DOH. If you don't want to upgrade, it takes about a year to get trips that are really good. But the trips before then still aren't terrible. After that you get to start picking the best trips because of many upgrades so your seniority moves quick.
Cant speak for the ERJ side.
I would say overall, if you live in base, or close with a 1 hour commute to a juniorish base, Skywest is pretty good. You can fly a lot, upgrade quick, then fly a lot and move on. Lots of Skywest pilots moving on right now. Almost all of the crews are pretty cool and we stay at a mix of really nice, to pretty nice hotels. A couple outlier crappy hotels that hopefully they are working on, but that's rare.
No regerts here. I'm sure there are regionals with better work rules on some things, but Skywest is pretty dang stable and easy to just show up and go with the flow and get the job done and go home.