Originally Posted by
Lighteningspeed
You can't be a 4th year FO at Mesaba unless you refuse to upgrade. Right now upgrade into Saabs are less than 6 months and Saab CA makes $43/hr. Your comparisons makes no sense at all. You have to start at first year pay and even on this Mesaba is ahead. Plus, Compass does not pay for lodging during ground school whereas, Mesaba pays for single occupancy hotel room for your entire stay in Minneapolis and during your sim training. CRJ200s are coming to Mesaba even as we speak and Mesaba has around 12 CRJ200s already and they are here to stay until NWA decides to replace DC9s with 100 seat mainline jets, in which case Compass will also lose E175s along with CRJ200s. This is not some conjecture, I just returned from a FLTops Pilot conference during which NWA and DAL representative made a joint presentation on what their future plans are.
Are you sure upgrades are still 6 months? Just looking at the way things look now I'd say if you were hired now you are looking at a time frame of years instead of months. There haven't been upgrades since last year and with 500 FO's all slowly building time toward an upgrade, I'd say if you were hired now - best case scenario the way things stand right now would be under 2 years. What few captain slots open up are going to be snatched up real quick real high up the list. Those last few street captains hired are going to be sitting reserve a real long time.
As for hiring 300 more pilots this year - is this still going to happen? The hiring has slowed to a trickle and 300 sounds like a lot of people to hire under 5 months (being as all classes are rumored to have been pushed back to August).