pete2800

The ipad is provided, and will have the company manuals on it. You still will need a binder for your Jepps.

Galaxy5

3/5 hired yesterday, and I start class in February! What a great experience and great people. It feels like a great company to work for.

cactusflyer

The iPads are issued during ground school, and you'll use them in the classroom and in the airplane, since they have all of our manuals as well as our in-house weight and balance program on them.

Aside from mandating that we keep a certain amount of free memory space on the device, and having to comply with an acceptable use policy, the company generally doesn't care if we install other apps on the iPads (although management apparently can see what apps we have installed), so most people have stuff like Pandora, Netflix, and some games installed on their iPads to kill time on long sits or overnights.

We're supposed to get Jepps on the iPads sometime soon (although we'll have to carry paper charts as well during an evaluation phase), but the pilot group has been told "about a month" for the approval timeline since at least January.

Since Horizon has a relatively small route structure, I'm able to comfortably fit all of the approach plates into a single two-inch binder, with a second (maybe 1/2 full) two-inch binder for less used stuff like enroute charts and the Alaska approach plates.

csucbrown

Was that the earliest class date offered? Seems like a long time to wait.

Galaxy5

The other class offered was mid/late January. Two of us took the 2 Feb, but I'm not sure what the other guy took since he was out of there before us. It works best for my availability and was only a two week difference.

beau172

Hey everyone, I would love to work for Horizon. I just had question about the current upgrade time. Do you guys expect it to drop anytime soon?

pete2800

Worst case scenario, no. It has come down a bit, but at this point there are a lot of pilots hired in 06-07 that would need to be upgraded for the time to drop below what it is now.

With that said... The Anchorage base seems to be a major de-motivator for some senior FO's to accept an upgrade class. In my estimation, we've been seeing a higher than normal amount of people bypass the upgrade simply because they don't want to go to ANC. As of next bid, there are no overnights in ANC, which means that as a commuter you have to find your way to and from your crashpad every night. This means we have senior people bypassing the upgrade, while more junior people take it. This shows the upgrade time as dropping, but somewhat artificially.

From a conversation I had with another FO yesterday, he was just called and offered an upgrade class, but he declined. This person was hired in October of 2006. Below him on the list there are around 50 people who were hired through the end of 2008. Then there was no one hired until January of 2011, and then only 2 classes in all of 2011. If current attrition and rate of upgrades continue, I'd expect the upgrade time to drop to the 2011/2012 range maybe by the end of next year. So yes, it might drop to about 4 years. But if you're not already in, you're already too late for a 4 year upgrade. We've hired 160 people in 2013/2014. It will take a long time to work through those people unless the company grows significantly.

beau172

Thanks for the detailed response!

jetavdk

Hey guys/gals,
Just called for an interview and scheduled it for 12/10.

beau172

How long is reserve running these days, somewhere like Biose?