When the wheels 1st started coming off at Abxair in 2009 after DHL bought Airborne Express and dicked it all up....a good friend of mine who was DC9 Captain could not find a pilot job in the US...he had a job offer to fly a 9 in Africa for 10k a month 5 mos on 1 mo off every 6 mos! I asked him if he was crazy? His answer was what else am I going to do? My answer was...anything!!!. He answered an add as a heating and airconditioning estimator at a big commercial company with no experience made north of 100k and loves it. As you say bankruptcy and losing the house are likely then....anything! Hell a store manager at Walmart pays 100k! I am sure you might not be interested in that but that is not the issue...keeping a roof over you head IS the issue! I was not interested in cleaning bathrooms at the gas station I worked at when I was 16 but after my mom moved out and my brother and I were on our own I needed the money! Get your A&P license you've got the time to do it! It will keep you around aviation. Look at all options..now is not the time to be picky.

ABteacher ... I don’t mean to be discouraging as I’m sure there must be a slot for you someplace but one issue you face is the available positions for ground instructors. When I started in 1979 you had ground instruction 8 hours a day for 2 plus weeks . Fast forward to 2016 and my last checkout and I had an instructor day one for System Qual review and another for 2 hrs on day 2 to administer the written test. Good luck I’m sure you will find a spot ..

I can relate; I was there!
 

This place is a complete joke of an airline; I was there for training as a First Officer, and coming from a reputable regional airline; I could tell right away this place does not have their act together. At first glance it looked like a very lucrative job; $66.00/hr, full pay in training at the min guarantee plus per diem and here's the catcher... 40hrs of pay for the 2 months of pointless CBT's you have to do before you show up to class. (we'll revisit the 40hrs pay subject later)
So comes the first day of class, there are six of us and it's in a hotel conference room, not even at the hotel we're staying at; we had to shuttle over to another hotel to use their conference room.. hmm okay. So on the first day, the CEO's daughter who works for the company comes in to take care of the drug and alcohol testing and I kid you not the first words out of her mouth were "You all are in for a very rude awakening." She didn't say "hi, hello," or anything; just sat in the back of the room with a scowl on her face the whole time. Then she assigned us another CBT on top of the many we already had to do, but this one was 3hrs worth of videos that were made in the 1980's about Drug and Alcohol abuse (had absolutely nothing to do with the 737 or company procedures) then it made you take a 15 question test which you had to score a 100% on otherwise you would have to go back and watch the full 3hrs of videos again to re-take the test. Literally everybody in class had to spend an entire day going through hours of videos to keep taking the test until we got all the answers correct. Our instructor even emailed her asking why this was necessary and she never got back to him. She changed the passing rate to an 80% only to go back and change it to 100%, failing me and two others forcing us to have to do it all over again. Very nice young lady to say the least…

The training was basically non-existent, not to rail on the instructor; he was a very nice man and genuinely cared about our well being however the company gave him nothing to work with at all. No syllabus or anything; we basically sat in class the first week going over Drug and Alcohol BS and pointless Ops Specs that had nothing to do with the type of flying that we were going to be doing. There was a former Director of Ops sitting in the back “monitoring the class” and every time somebody had a relevant question he would insult their intelligence with “Are you sure you’re an ATP rated pilot?” Like seriously dude? There was only one or two days where we actually covered systems on the 737 of the two weeks that I was in training. If you wanted to learn the plane before you got to sim, you had better teach yourself because they sure as heck aren’t going to do that. It was an all self taught course and the instructor was there to basically baby sit us. I have heard of people who are not prepared when they get to the sims and given the very few sim sessions you have, many people fail the check ride or the oral and end up tarnishing their FAA record for this place.

Then one day the lady who is in charge of payroll came in and we asked her if she was familiar with the new pay structure of full pay in training plus 40hrs of credit for the CBT’s on our first paycheck. She gave us a very vague response and danced around the question like a politician. So came our first paycheck and to my huge surprise I did not get even close to what I calculated I should get. I estimated we should get about 5k for two weeks at full pay plus per diem and 40hrs CBT pay. Nope, we all each got a whopping $1300.00. Nobody could honestly explain this to us and one of the guys in my class who was training as a captain noticed he got the FO pay rate instead of Capt. pay. That was when he had enough and walked out. The chief pilot came in after hearing of the captain quitting and asked “did this man quit” we said yes, to which the chief pilot yelled “GOOD,” then grabbed his name tag off the desk and ripped it apart into about 20 pieces and slammed it into the trash can. The next day we had to undergo TSA training because as a pilot with Swift you have to be a TSA agent too. Complete waste of time in that class, however that morning another guy in our class decided to quit as well. When the chief pilot heard of two guys quitting in two days, he came in the class with a bribe to us all (Dunkin Donuts) and said “Okay guys let’s eat and talk this over.” We stated to him the issues we had been having with our pay and that the company is not honoring what they said they would pay us. He then called the payroll department and had a 15min. phone call basically arguing with them the entire time trying to get us paid saying if they don’t pay us, the rest of us are going to walk out. Well that wasn’t good enough for payroll because they still refused to pay us. The Chief Pilot at this point “promised us we would get paid.” But by now we could all see that promised made are never kept with this company. Another guy quit and walked out shortly after.
Later that day the Chief Pilot and Director of ops came in the room with only three out of six of us still remaining and attacked us saying basically saying he didn’t like us and had no intention of keeping us around. Two guys immediately walked out which left only one remaining.
This is just my experience with Swift Air; a quick google search will reveal MANY MORE LIKE IT!
A person in upper management said they were shocked about the reviews and forum on airlinepilotcentral however, apparently they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around. Thanks again though for the Dunkin Donuts, it more than makes up for the $3000.00 which I am still currently owed!

This place is a complete joke of an airline; I was there for training as a First Officer, and coming from a reputable regional airline; I could tell right away this place does not have their act together. At first glance it looked like a very lucrative job; $66.00/hr, full pay in training at the min guarantee plus per diem and here's the catcher... 40hrs of pay for the 2 months of pointless CBT's you have to do before you show up to class. (we'll revisit the 40hrs pay subject later)
So comes the first day of class, there are six of us and it's in a hotel conference room, not even at the hotel we're staying at; we had to shuttle over to another hotel to use their conference room.. hmm okay. So on the first day, the CEO's daughter who works for the company comes in to take care of the drug and alcohol testing and I kid you not the first words out of her mouth were "You all are in for a very rude awakening." She didn't say "hi, hello," or anything; just sat in the back of the room with a scowl on her face the whole time. Then she assigned us another CBT on top of the many we already had to do, but this one was 3hrs worth of videos that were made in the 1980's about Drug and Alcohol abuse (had absolutely nothing to do with the 737 or company procedures) then it made you take a 15 question test which you had to score a 100% on otherwise you would have to go back and watch the full 3hrs of videos again to re-take the test. Literally everybody in class had to spend an entire day going through hours of videos to keep taking the test until we got all the answers correct. Our instructor even emailed her asking why this was necessary and she never got back to him. She changed the passing rate to an 80% only to go back and change it to 100%, failing me and two others forcing us to have to do it all over again. Very nice young lady to say the least…

The training was basically non-existent, not to rail on the instructor; he was a very nice man and genuinely cared about our well being however the company gave him nothing to work with at all. No syllabus or anything; we basically sat in class the first week going over Drug and Alcohol BS and pointless Ops Specs that had nothing to do with the type of flying that we were going to be doing. There was a former Director of Ops sitting in the back “monitoring the class” and every time somebody had a relevant question he would insult their intelligence with “Are you sure you’re an ATP rated pilot?” Like seriously dude? There was only one or two days where we actually covered systems on the 737 of the two weeks that I was in training. If you wanted to learn the plane before you got to sim, you had better teach yourself because they sure as heck aren’t going to do that. It was an all self taught course and the instructor was there to basically baby sit us. I have heard of people who are not prepared when they get to the sims and given the very few sim sessions you have, many people fail the check ride or the oral and end up tarnishing their FAA record for this place.

Then one day the lady who is in charge of payroll came in and we asked her if she was familiar with the new pay structure of full pay in training plus 40hrs of credit for the CBT’s on our first paycheck. She gave us a very vague response and danced around the question like a politician. So came our first paycheck and to my huge surprise I did not get even close to what I calculated I should get. I estimated we should get about 5k for two weeks at full pay plus per diem and 40hrs CBT pay. Nope, we all each got a whopping $1300.00. Nobody could honestly explain this to us and one of the guys in my class who was training as a captain noticed he got the FO pay rate instead of Capt. pay. That was when he had enough and walked out. The chief pilot came in after hearing of the captain quitting and asked “did this man quit” we said yes, to which the chief pilot yelled “GOOD,” then grabbed his name tag off the desk and ripped it apart into about 20 pieces and slammed it into the trash can. The next day we had to undergo TSA training because as a pilot with Swift you have to be a TSA agent too. Complete waste of time in that class, however that morning another guy in our class decided to quit as well. When the chief pilot heard of two guys quitting in two days, he came in the class with a bribe to us all (Dunkin Donuts) and said “Okay guys let’s eat and talk this over.” We stated to him the issues we had been having with our pay and that the company is not honoring what they said they would pay us. He then called the payroll department and had a 15min. phone call basically arguing with them the entire time trying to get us paid saying if they don’t pay us, the rest of us are going to walk out. Well that wasn’t good enough for payroll because they still refused to pay us. The Chief Pilot at this point “promised us we would get paid.” But by now we could all see that promised made are never kept with this company. Another guy quit and walked out shortly after.
Later that day the Chief Pilot and Director of ops came in the room with only three out of six of us still remaining and attacked us saying basically saying he didn’t like us and had no intention of keeping us around. Two guys immediately walked out which left only one remaining.
This is just my experience with Swift Air; a quick google search will reveal MANY MORE LIKE IT!
A person in upper management said they were shocked about the reviews and forum on airlinepilotcentral however, apparently they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around. Thanks again though for the Dunkin Donuts, it more than makes up for the $3000.00 which I am still currently owed!

True dat! I keep saying before long we will be doing our PC's on a laptop while sitting on the john! My company has dumbed down grd school to a home study course and 1/2 day systems review with a 20 question test when you walk in the door. With a couple breaks its about 3 hrs total.

Looks like ya'll got sold. Anyone know what's going on?

Any chance that iAero CEO is the same Robert Caputo that got nailed for $3mil of mail fraud in Nevada? Wouldn't really be a perfect Corrosion Corner story otherwise. I saw some of the other names connected to Air Methods and that Jumpjet private jet ride sharing deal.

Edit: Link to a press release naming some of the big players. It names iAero as "a leading integrated aviation business" with ramp space and MRO facilites at KMIA.

Anyone have a link?

Nevermind. Found it.

Application
 

Anyone currently with Swift mind PM-ing me? I have a few questions.

Planning to add 18 aircraft.