August 16 class
 

Anyone here in the upcoming class?

You talking the new hire class that starts on the 13th?

I think he's talking about the orientation class that starts on 8/16. I will be in that class

In the school house!
 

In case you all were wondering - our group started out last week!
We had 5 in our class. 2 military, 1 former 121 and 2 CFI's. We're on our home study now. A lot more work than I anticipated on the home study side. From what I deduced, hiring has slowed to accommodate Captain upgrades. Overall pretty impressed with Compass with their organization in the classroom and footprint laid out for us. Not loving the home study but appreciate being home with the family vs being in a hotel and doing this in a classroom setting.

Right on! Say wassup to the class for us, welcome!

Awesome! Best of luck! Keep us posted if you guys hear any changes about hiring/interviews.

Any word on if there will be a delay for sims due to captain upgrades? 5 seems like a relatively small class.

Are the military dudes ex-fixed wing or rotary wing? Did they leave the military current or non-current? Asking for a friend.

Military guys were fixed wing and current

They just posted a vacancy for November for 28 captain upgrades and 41 FO vacancies.

Somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but that's the most upgrades in a bid period we've ever done, or at least in 3 years. That's really extraordinary. The list will continue to move pretty fast.

I sure hope so! Can’t wait to join you guys!

Currently waiting for my sims to start, it is about a three and a half week to 4 week gap between FPTs and Sims. Apparently we looked everywhere for availability. But besides that everything else is going by pretty smooth!

Even looked at Paris?

Supposedly. And potentially even a 190 sim in Orlando.

So are you saying that CPZ is considering outsourcing sim training

Not the instructors, but they find/rent sim time at other places.

Interviewing a few months back. They mentioned Paris was an option and people loved it. It is not outsourcing just another option for sims to get us on the line.

Would finding additional sim facilities help expedite the backlog significantly and interviews significantly?

Well clearly additional sim time would help the backlog, but this is not a Compass unique problem. The attrition of trained people to the majors and LCCs is far higher across the board, putting more people in training, which has impacted sim time availability. Since many of these people have lower experience levels than their predecessors, and yeah, many of the instructors have less experience than THEIR predecessors (who were recently taken up to mainline), the students now are requiring more sim sessions per sim pair than their predecessors as well.

So yeah, it would help if people were getting to IOE reliably quicker, but I don't see that changing soon.

The extent to which this is causing Compass to freeze (or at least greatly reduce) interviews is something only a management guy could tell you. Certainly it would be a factor, they don't want to pay you when they don't have a classroom seat or sim to put you in - but Compass has been trying to get more FOs in the bottom than attrition because we were way behind. Eventually, the number coming in the bottom and departing the top ought to balance but how many pilots we'll have when that happens is unfortunately a management call.