E-175 new-hire, commute from GEG?
 

I posted a couple months ago asking about housing options in SEA. I appreciate all the helpful advice, but I'm starting to abandon the idea of living in base because of the -insane- housing market there.

I know commuting will open an entirely different can of worms for me, but I'm looking very hard at Spokane, with ~10 daily flights seems more commuter friendly than just about anywhere. (Anywhere that has relatively affordable real estate anyway.)

Also toying with the idea of just switching from the jet to the Q, and hopefully getting based out of GEG at some point.

If I stay on the jet, are there any other GEG-SEA commuters out there who could let me know what I might be in for? Especially while on reserve. Is a crash pad the norm?

Thanks again.

If you do decide to go that route, take a look at Cheney:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheney,_Washington

It's a small college town (Eastern Washington University) about nine or ten miles from Geiger. That's somewhat farther than the city of Spokane, but you don't have to deal with the Spokane Valley traffic which can sometimes get brutal. It has fast access to Geiger mostly by interstate, and a pleasant little town. And in the winter, the roads are more reliably cleared of snow and black ice.

Just a suggestion.

There are quite a few people that commute from Spokane. Any commute is going to reduce your quality of life to an extent, and I would switch to the Q before I commuted, but it is something that you could do. You would almost certainly need a crash pad for reserve, and maybe even when you have a line.

Why did you rule out the Gig Harbor, Purdy, Port Orchard area, out of curiosity?

Totally agree. Any extra cost of living is easily made up in not stressing or loosing time to commuting to work..

Rule it out? Probably not warranted, but you got to admit that the highway 16/ I-5 interchange has been under CONTINUOUS construction for longer than many first officers have been alive. :mad:

ANY drive to work beats even an easy commute! i will take the construction and traffic over ANY commute.

I lived in Spokane for sometime. Like any city, there are the good and the bad areas. I rented a room for dirt cheap with some college buddies that was in an interesting part of town..... You will have a lot of flight options, so that helps. And, you could drive to SEA if needed... Not fun, but if they do long call, that could take the stress off. Buy a nice van, live in it down by the sound when at SEA. Long term, living on the west side of the sound will be better. Short term, you could sell the van when you get a line. Honestly, living just outside Seattle and taking public tranist to the link or all the way by bus will proabbly be just as easy.

Myself, been commuting within our system for many years. Wasn't too bad when load factors were 70%. As load factors approach 90% it has become almost unbearable. When your commute home is longer than your work day something is wrong. Spokane is one of the worst commute legs. Back in the golden days of the airlines load factors were 40-50% and schedules allowed 18-20 days off per month it was a reasonable life.
Now I live in the domicile I commuted to and life is mucho better.

Speaking of GEG, how long would a new FO have to wait to hold that base?

Looks like on the recent drop, most junior GEG based FO is 10/2017 hire.

Commuted GEG-SEA for over 20 years. Only had one issue when flight weather diverted to PDX. As a QX guy you've got priority for the cockpit jumpseat.

You clearly didn’t make that commute last summer. 3 different times over the summer it took me to my 3rd attempt to finally get out. Sure there’s a ton of frequency and some empty planes. But I haven’t noticed empty planes as the norm. Keep in mind also that GEG is classified as (sorry I forget the term) commuter/close in city to sea where pax change fees are either waived or severely reduced. So as the day goes by, flight loads fluctuate severely. It’s hard to plan anything. Plus, GEG gets flow more than most other airports considering proximity to sea. All I’m saying is buyer beware.

Yeah, its been 5 years since I did it. Don't you guys have commuter non-r3v passes? AS had D8Y code which got you on before all other (except management/deadhead/instructor) non-revs. You should also have priority for the jumpseat after AS pilots.

We don't. We only have commuter priority on our metal.

You guys don't get priority on the jump? That's frickin' ridiculous.

At Alaska we only have D8Y priority on Alaska and Skywest. We technically can’t use Horizon as part of our commuter policy. Having Skywest in the mix makes it much better for us. We also do not get priority in the jump-seat over non-commuter. The jump-seat is always first come/ first served on Alaska