If I were in your shoes, I would consider Horizon (assuming you want SEA). If you need to be on the west coast you limit your options: Compass where you can stay here, Horizon, and SkyWest. If you don't care where you live you can jump to an airline that will give you the hours quickly and either move closer to that or just deal with the commute holding a line.

Sure the regionals are turbulent as folks have pointed out, but I will say while I have been flying I have watched SkyWest grow from what was under 3000 pilots to what APC is advertising today...over 4200 pilots. And from what I have heard they have ambitions for 5000 pilots.

If you are looking for stability, at this point I think the WO are going to be more stable...as long as the legacies continue to hire. I could be wrong in that prediction. With the AA WO you can build your time, try to get on with one of the other legacies until your flow date, and worst case you will end up at AA. Piedmont is supposedly 3-5 year flow. 12-15 month upgrade, sooner with prior 121. Plus they are still taking deliveries of 145s through 2018.

Probably the biggest lesson for you is to take what a recruiter says with a grain of salt. So Piedmont offering a 3-5 year flow, I would lean more towards 5 years.

 

Anyone else notice that the lax rsv availability on comply was never posted this morning?


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Well there's a shocker..

 

As I'm a new guy, I'm sure you guys probably have better insight than I:

Let's say you're at the very bottom of the seniority list now, how many more months would you expect before holding a line? I'm getting the impression it's currently about 10 months so march 2018?

 

It might not be that long. I've heard from a few poeple that SEA will get a bunch of the flying that will result from the MSP closing.

 

I hope you're right, especially as I'm a MSP guy who's wanted SEA. But I have also seen a recent post in this thread from a guy in SEA that says he has been sitting reserve 12 months there already

 

I was in the same boat as you man and I'm a June hire. I was getting pretty frustrated commuting to RSV and then all the bad news hit, I was really considering a lateral move. I moved over to LAX and was on LCR and now a build-up. Yeah you don't fly as much on LCR, but the QOL is so much better, especially as an east coast commuter. As it's been stated before, the regional industry changes too fast to guess what will happen in a few months. Knowing my luck if I went to 9E, DL would pull the -200s. PSA, Envoy would get their -700s back and then CPZ would probably announce some UA flying or something. I decided I'll just sit tight, enjoy my days at home, and wait for a line. I really, really don't want to sit in another regional initial class. I figure if **** hits the fan, by that point I'll have enough time to bail to an LCC which I would take over any regional. So my advice? Just stick it out. Things will get better hopefully. I mean things aren't great here. I know that. But they could be a lot worse. Hope this helped.

 

In May:
LAX 160 FO full lines awarded with 233 bidding (68.7%)
MSP 42 FO full lines awarded with 78 bidding (53.8%)
SEA 39 FO full lines awarded with 70 bidding (55.7%)

To clarify how I came up with those numbers- on my comply, I opened the May 2017 bid awards, looked at each base considering 75 hours credit to be a full line. So although in LAX the most Jr line holder was 167 it only credited​ 37.8. Next I went to the end of each one to see how many active bidders there were.

Flica currently shows 86 FO in MSP, 75 FO in SEA and 262 in LAX. That's a total of 423 FOs. Unfortunately only 241 of those 423 were awarded a line. That means 182 FOs were either on Reserve or non bidders​.

With 9 FOs leaving in April that reduces the surplus. For Slowhawk this should give you the tools to make an informed decision.

Until we know how the MSP crew will be divided, we won't know what the mix for SEA or LAX will be. But Slowhawk and other junior FOs may be on reserve for longer than CaptainDooley thinks.

Do your own math, use the information you have available and test my theory of 80%. If the number of lines is less than 80% of bidders that tells you how overstaffed​ we are.
They are running upgrades​ and LAX CA was 78.1%, SEA CA is 77.4% and MSP CA is 61.8%.

 

Thanks veewan. I wish I knew how hilariously overstaffed we were before I started training. Even without losing 6 planes they were extremely fat

 

If the above math is right, that is crazy to hear 56% of company wide FO's have a line while 44% sit reserve. That seems really high. Not sure what normal should be though.

Also, I didn't listen to the phone call and I try not to believe what they say until it is announced anymore, but one part is curious to me from people here who did listen to the phone call. Asking about upgrades and the response was we are running one this month but it is too early to tell for the year? What does that mean? Too early to see if we need more classes? I would imagine they will need to upgrade every month from now on barring anymore bad news.