Originally Posted by V1Rotate

Regional Captain here with a job offer at JetBlue, and I like the company, have for years. However, when it looks like I’m going to soon be making in the ballpark of 200k at my regional, I’m not sure JetBlue is a win from a pay standpoint.



I built a spreadsheet comparing my regionals TA to JetBlues current payscale, assumed 85 hours a month at either company and an upgrade time of five years if I go to JetBlue. Based on that I didn’t even break even in terms of total gross cumulative pay at ten years with their current payscale. Adding a hypothetical 15% pay increase got me to breaking even at 7-8 years, and adding 20% got me to breaking even at 6 years.



So if the pay is actually less (at least for a good while) at JetBlue why go? Well QOL could be one good reason, and by QOL I mostly mean days off, I have just 11 this month, the new TA if passed, would guarantee me a whopping 12. However, most current JetBlue bases mean commuting for me, which mitigates many of the QOL gains. Yellow Airbus bases could work better for me, but we don’t know when or even probably 100% sure if they are going to open up. For example what if there ends up being some stipulation in the contract keeping blue and yellow pilots from going to each others bases for a time? What if the DOJ shuts the entire merger down? (Probably not, but you never know)



With most regionals paying their captains in the ballpark if 200k now, or soon, are majors like JetBlue going to make some fairly drastic increases to their FO pay scales to keep people like me coming in the door, or are they simply going to just hire FOs, captains willing to take the pay cut and so on?