The way you said, “The negatives are all the same from other posts and mostly revolve around the contract,” strikes me as kind of brushing off the importance of the contract an airline pilot works under as relatively inconsequential. It’s kind of like saying something like, “Except for the contract, this place is great.”

I don’t know if that’s how you meant it.

But for the guys who don’t have a lot of experience working under a collective bargaining agreement (contract), it functions sort of like the DNA for an airline pilot’s life. DNA specifies how an organism looks and behaves.

Similarly, the contract defines how much of your life, and a lot of your family’s life, at work and outside of work, looks and feels. It determines how much you get paid, how hard you have to work while you’re at work, how many days off you get, how much vacation you get, whether you and your family have access to life-saving medical care without going into bankruptcy, how much money you will have in retirement, and on and on. The contract you end up working under is not an unimportant thing - at all.

Chimps and humans share almost 99% of the same genetic code. Yet, there are huge differences in the way chimps and humans look and behave. Its kinda the same with airline pilot contracts: you might be tempted to dismiss the differences between different airline pilot contracts as trifling and insignificant. I’d say that’s a mistake.