Airline Pilot Central Forums - USA Jet

Quote:

Originally Posted by maxconthrust (Post 3637462)

How many guaranteed hours in a month do you guys get?

Hourly rate for 1st year FO? or are you paid a fixed monthly salary?

When I left the company the DC-9/MD-80 FO hourly rate was ~$100/hr, no idea what Falcon was/is. (I think the pay table on APC is inaccurate) There is a minimum guarantee fixed salary but you also get another big chunk every month on top of that. On top of your min monthly guarantee you also get about $500 (or more) per trip you fly ("trip pay"), plus if you help load or unload cargo it's another $100 or so per load / unload, and you can also sell days back (at least $750 per day or more depending on ops factors). When I took the job I budgeted an average of at least 4 trips per month (at least another $2,000 per month) on top of a 45 hour min guarantee pay, and I was always pleasantly surprised. If you want to make a *lot* of money there's nothing stopping you other than your time available. In full months of availability on normal bids without selling days back I could almost always get 6 to 8 trips, and more than 10 could happen sometimes. Some road warriors could do even more. Do the math and you see it all adds up quickly. The only down side is if the manufacturing industry takes a downturn, or a governor shuts your economy down, you're back to just your min guarantee. But as long as the company is humming along I was very happy with the money. Profit margins are larger than pax airlines.

It's possible a lot of this has changed and if it did it would be even better pay than explained above.

The main downside in pay was 401k was meh and like I said, if there's a downturn in the manufacturing industry there will be a downturn in the company and your paycheck.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Busman (Post 3636963)

Was there decades ago, place is a ****hole, definitely avoid unless you are starving !!!

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. My experience flying for them was really good. I had great scheduling, flexibility, great money, good coworkers, no FAs or pax to deal with, good leadership, good training, good maintenance, excellent opportunity to fly a real airplane, and I enjoyed being a part of keeping North American manufacturing humming. I felt fortunate to have flown for them and would highly recommend it as long as an erratic sleep schedule isn't an issue for you.

My main complaint which was the main reason I decided to take another opportunity that came along was the inability to know what side of the clock you would be flying. With 1 hour callout around the clock sometimes you flew in the middle of the night, sometimes the day, and with how busy the company became the fatigue started compounding in the chronic sense. My new job offer came the morning after I was beat up a few days in row. The company has a great fatigue management program for the acute fatigue, and they would always support pilots without question from what I saw, but they didn't seem to have either the ability or the interest in scheduling pilots so they would at least know whether they could sleep at night or day for their duty periods and stick to that through the periods. I also didn't like the company getting involved in pushing some divisive political/ideological issues in the workplace and in its communications. Other than those issues I felt the company was a great place to fly and earn more income than most of the other options out there. Being a smaller growing company was also a nice bonus.

Quote:

Originally Posted by flyerB727 (Post 3634046)

All MD and 727s? The 727s going to stay in the fleet for the foreseeable future?

My impressions: They purchased the MDs recently and they still have a lot of life left in them. Just look how long they flew the DC-9s! Wouldn't be surprised for the MDs to remain at least another decade. 727, who knows, could see them hanging on a long time or deciding tomorrow on something else. Not being there anymore I don't have any news, and even if I was still in they probably don't want to announce any possibilities of fleet change until they're ready. But what I do know is that any discussion of 727 replacement options invariably results in realizing basically nothing out there on the market can truly replace the 727 and anything that sorta does may be prohibitively expensive while still not being as capable as a 727. Kinda similar issue with the Falcons. I have no idea what they will do but it's not an easy problem to solve. They just don't make 'em like they used to!

BTW someone on this thread earlier in the year commented about "Roadrunner". That is obsolete and incorrect info. The company is no longer part of Roadrunner. It is part of Ascent Global Logistics now and the CEO who came in was great to work with and he and the whole team in my view really did a lot to clean up some of the Roadrunner issues. I actually had a lot of respect for him and he did a lot to learn about our operations and talk with the pilots one-on-one after coming back from trips in the middle of the night to learn or even just say "thank you." Ascent seems to be a positive change for the airline. Still a lot that can be improved (like not rushing a plane out to a location and waiting for hours on end when the cargo isn't even *made* yet when the pilots could have got a few more hours of sleep), but overall the company felt like it was going in a good direction.

Hope that all helped! Others who are still in can probably answer better but I hope this was a good start and happy to answer whatever I can.