Don’t expect much flexibility in your line schedule, at least from crew scheduling. I have t been able to successfully drop even a turn in over two years without having to take a sick day, personal day or borrow from next years vacation.

They will simply tell you not enough resources even though there are 25 sitting reserve that day.

You can have some luck trading stuff but again, don’t expect help from the company in this regard. Crew scheduling is most certainly antagonistic towards the pilots.

No idea about Piedmont, but at Envoy the ability to trade comes with holding a line. Don’t expect to be able to trade reserve days, and even if you have a line, trades can be difficult and limited to what is available that has been deemed “more critical” to cover than what you want to get out of. There have been times that despite trips being available, I could not trade out of what I already had.

2-3 years? NHs are either Piedmont or Envoy have almost 10 years to flow... that’s 10 years of working your ass off, lagging the rest of the industry in pay and QOL items.

When you’re a year or two out from flow like some of us the busting your ass for 2 more years doesn’t sound too bad. When you’re 9+ years out, it sounds aweful.

2-3 years is what it should take to upgrade no?
That’s what I was hinting at.
Work your ass off for your upgrade then sit back and decide where to go from there.
Or stay.
Maybe.

The best QOL at any of the AA WOs is a line-holder at PSA. You can credit 100+ hours with 12-13 days off or drop down to 65 hours and 17-19 days off. That being said you’ll be on reserve a very long time at PSA as almost half of our entire pilot group is on reserve.

That’s a little misleading as only a very small sample size would achieve the numbers you state. Plus you hear about everyone having issues with SAP lately.

I haven’t had any real issues with the SAP personally. Processing times have been long at times but I never don’t get what I want. Those credit values were with my originally awarded line of about 95 hours. With our pay override I’ll likely add an additional 7-9 hours of pay for the month and end up with 12 off and roughly 103-105 credit.

The thing with PSA is that the disparity between reserve and a Round 1 lineholder is pretty stark. Reserve here isn’t great. But it isn’t great anywhere at a regional. But once you can hold a line the quality of life here improves dramatically. I’m not trying to convince the OP to come to PSA. Like I said, they will likely experience a very long time on reserve here right now.

Reserve is interesting. Living in base bidding reserve, trying not to fly as a 145 FO here at Envoy would be very similar to getting paid and receiving benefits to literally do nothing after the first few months. You could easily get another (flexible) job, or go back to school and knock out a BA. We do not have an effective reserve time balancing system.

Whole new world of QOL for those inclined to do that - but few are.

That's really not possible anymore even for senior FOs. Things are balancing out

DFW 175 has a few super senior FO's, who could easily hold a line as DCL CA, who are still hanging at the top of the reserve list, and only pick up the sweet OT trips that pop up on their days off.
I've never seen them actually fly off RAP. They seem to be almost hitting 100 hours a year.