Elevation

I fly at Atlas which has a gateway program similar to but not entirely equal to home-basing. The value of home-basing depends on your minimum standard of living.

If you are comfortable in a crappy crash-pad at $150/month, the value of home basing is $1800/year. If you’d be getting yourself a $100/night hotel prior to a trip, the value would be roughly $6000/year. Same math applies with your stadnards regarding jump-seating to work v. positive space travel.

Me, I am used to living pretty poorly. I’d rather have the higher pay rate and retirement offered elsewhere.

4runner

What??? Filler

Cujo665

You're leaving out all the wasted time jumpseaters spend missing flights, spending time planning their commute, finding flights and connecting flights to get where they're going. When I commuted I used to be looking at loads at least a day in advance (on my day off) trying to decide which flights looked best.

Used to have to have an airport car for leaving in the parking lot that could take a few dings and not be noticed in the dents, and had to pay $100 a month for the parking lot.

Home Basing is huge. No stress, ever. No wasting valuable family time at home trying to plan getting to work. No looking for at least 2 flights that get there in time. No standing at the gate wondering if any of their own guys are going to show up and bump you out of the jumpseat.

You get your travel notice, pick your seat on your phone app, then go back to playing with your kids. Then your wife drops you at the airport and off you go. Not having to go to a car lot and take a shuttle to the airport saves another 30 minutes each way. You build your frequent flyer miles up fairly quickly, so you soon are always boarding in group 1, or being upgraded.

Just the wasted time alone from not having to jumpseat adds up to serious time yearly that could have been used flying overtime, or spending more time with the family.

It makes the job very stress free. I used to joke (when I was a commuter) that the hardest part of my job was getting to/from work. Now the hardest part is remaining sharp and current, since you just never seem to get enough landings or stick time. I think the average is 30-50 hours of flight time per month currently.

Hetman

Home basing is priceless.

atpcliff

Your monetary calculations are off. You are only talking about the cost of a crashpad for a month. You are not including the costs of anything else, for example: The costs when you may have to buy a ticket, the costs when you may have to book a hotel somewhere you get stuck, the costs of waiting to see if you can get on a plane, or if you may miss making your trip, the costs of having to coordinate your own travel, the costs of having to figure out what to do when your travel falls through, etc., etc.

Also, it is one thing to be jumpseating from ORD to ATL. It is whole different animal when you live somewhere that doesn't have thousands of flights a day out of your home airport.

aviatorhi

What is the value of "home" basing? You can't put a price on peace of mind.

be76flyer

As someone who did that commute for 6 years, it is one of the hardest commutes there is. Many a nights I ended up doing ORD-LAX-ATL because it got me home earlier or I was on Fedex because I couldn't get out on the pax airlines, or the fact I knew how long it takes to get from MDW to ORD. I love gateway, having said that, if ACMI airlines want mainline CBAs than gateway will have to go away.

evanss9550

Hey guys, I'm looking to make the jump out of part 91 for something a bit more stable. I'm considering a bunch of different options, but wanted to reach out and see if i'd be competitive here, bases (or home based), future upgrade opportunities, QOL, etc...? Just general info. Thanks in advance!

3400 TT
1800 Turbine PIC
3 Type Ratings
All Part 91
Degree will be finished May 19' (Depending on possible training schedules with a job change)

Starchkr

I noticed that you guys at OMNI get to keep your airline miles, do you keep hotel points too?

GraceMonth

Depends. But generally, yes.