pangolin

Which bases are 175 bases?

Time to upgrade with prior 121 time?

QxFacts

SEA only. With mini/satellite bases (minimum flying) PDX and PAE

Horizon hasn’t upgraded E175 pilots for 3 bids now... beware.

porkchopexpress

Someone mentioned in another thread that the lack of E175 upgrades could be the company's way of trying to get people to upgrade on the Q. Exactly how bad is the situation for E175 new hires? Any guess on when upgrades will start again and how long it will take for everyone to catch up? Thanks.

QxFacts

You decide if you want to sit reserve not flying much for an indefinite period or go somewhere else that you can gain hours and advance your career.

snackysmores

Horizon has always had it's cyclical ups and downs. We're about to enter another big down swing, especially for new hires on either airframe.

DashAviator

I think you're probably right. During the time I've been at Horizon, I've nearly been furloughed twice (which is still way better than being unemployed). Some of the guys/gals furloughed in 2009-2010 were gone for two years, and some of them got out of aviation entirely. We also had a bunch of new captains who got downgraded.

Usually, Horizon will offer time off without pay and leaves of absence prior to announcing furloughs. We had around 770 pilots on the property in 2008 and around 550 in 2011. Some quit, some were on voluntary leave, and some got furloughed. The guy that was my sim partner in new-hire training quit and went back to his previous (non-aviation) job.

When the economy started improving around 2012, we were suddenly short-staffed. The company was reluctant to recall pilots on furlough. As a result, we got further and further behind on staffing, which lead to a complete staffing meltdown in 2016-2017.

It's either "feast or famine" around here.

DashAviator

I apologize to everyone for the bad case of "thread creep". It occurred to me that Duckman had an actual question. From what I've heard, if you interview now and get a conditional offer of employment for the jet, then you can EXPECT a class date sometime next year. I think the wait time for Q400 classes are around six months. Obviously, this depends a lot on the economy.

At the present time, most of the short-staffing is on the captain side. We are short on Q400 captains (in some bases) and the E175 captains are flying a fair amount. I expect that the company will run another E175 upgrade class pretty soon.

WelcomeAboard

I heard the next E175 upgrade class is not until October with only four vacancies. I think the company is trying to balance their captains per aircraft by pushing pilots to upgrade into the Q.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Tyler253

What is the time for upgrade on the Q. Im a captain at Gojet so I have the 121 time already.

thwhite2000

Hard to say. Often, the vacancy bids don’t even fill the available slots for Q Captains. That was the case in the September, when there were 8 upgrade slots in the Q, and only 6 were filled.

For October, all 8 slots were filled on the Q and a 3/2018 hire was the most junior.