Originally Posted by
jtf560
There is no typical week flying fractional and never will be. There will be weeks you spend at home on home standby. There will be weeks you fly 40+ hours and have many min rest nights and are freakin burned out. There is usually something in between. I believe the average fractional pilot puts in about 400 to 450 hours of flying a year. That has been my average in about 3.5 years, though the first year was over 700, the second 450, and the 3rd 250. There will usually be at least one day of doing nothing much either at an FBO or at the hotel on duty when a plane breaks or there just isn't anything for you to do. You will rarely wait for a customer to fly them back to wherever you picked them up unless it is the same day and nothing else pops up for you.
What JTF560 says above explains very well what life could be like for you at Netjets. I think a lot of it depends on the fleet you're flying. I was on the slave ship (Citation X), and they worked us pretty hard. I didn't experience any sitting at the hotel on call, or hanging around the FBO watching TV. Other fleets at Netjets were different...your mileage may vary.
You don't bid lines of travel (city pairs, etc) at Netjets, like you do at a Pt 121 airline. You basically bid for how many days you want to work. They have a 7 on, 7 off schedule, a 15 day schedule, and a 18 day reserve schedule (last I heard).
At Netjets, you never know where you could end up the next day. You might be positioning somewhere on a commercial flight, or you might be flying multiple legs to places you'd never imagine in your lifetime that you would see. Your Blackberry is the company leash around your neck that tells you the "who, what, where and when" of your next duty day. If you like knowing that you're spending Thursday night in Cleveland at the Holiday Inn, then Netjets is the wrong company for you. If you have a sense of adventure, and actually enjoy not knowing where you will spend the night until that same day, then Netjets is right up your alley.
The home basing issue is a huge deal, and if Netjets would have had it instead of the 5 domicile cities that I had to choose from, I just might have stayed.
With regard to management/pilot relations, I feel that Netjets was head and shoulders above what I experienced at either Delta or UPS. At Delta, relations were so-so, and at UPS, relations between the two groups is adversarial. I actually felt like the company cared about the pilots at Netjets...I can't say the same about Delta, and UPS...well...they are off scale high in the opposite direction.
Can't think of much more to say. If you have any other questions, post them here. Good luck.