Have you worked for a regional before? Most regionals I would say don’t do these types of things. Some, on the other hand, do. PSA is one of them. I thought people were just complaining and making excuses about PSA’s training before I came here, until I came here and found out. It’s a different culture. The training department, in my opinion, has a lot of strange characters. Some of them couldn’t ever move on to the majors for whatever reason and got stuck here. If I were a person in charge of pilot hiring at the majors, there is zero chance I would ever give some of these PSA lifers a chance. I’d prevent them from coming over and ‘infecting’ the culture at a legacy. Unfortunately they’re stuck at the regionals, which is bad for the ones who want to move up. They can affect people’s careers. and quite frankly many of them seem to like that. They like being the big fish in a little pond. Some, like one particular instructor I had in initial training, was the most awful human I’ve ever had the unfortunate privilege of dealing with. There are no words to describe how unprofessional and how much of a bully he is. Thankfully, he is no longer in the training department I heard.

These types of people do exist at some regionals, PSA being one of them. It was really bad before Covid. They managed to fire a lot of deadweight and toxic people during that time but unfortunately a few had remained. I had one of those as described above. This guy has a reputation so bad at PSA everyone knows who he is, yet the company doesn’t fire these types. They protect them. You would think they would send them out the door. But that’s not how PSA operates.

The company has gotten better over time, for sure. It’s come a long way, and I hope it continues to get better. I’m feeling pretty confident it will. I see more new faces in the training department each year and I have a more positive experience with many of the instructors compared to the ones I used to have, most of whom, thankfully, are gone.

To put things into perspective, I am a person who has never failed a checkride at PSA. But I was extremely unhappy with the experience and the abuse from some of my instructors. These people were so bad I’d call out sick in a heartbeat if I ever see them on my schedule. Each workplace, and in particular, airline training departments, have their own culture. Some are good, others not so good. Some are highly toxic. Some are just like that just because.