SWA vs UPS
 

Looking for real-time perspective. Six month new hire @ WN living in base on the east coast vs 5X commuting to ANC? Good/Bad/Indifferent? Opinions please?

Why would anyone want to commute to anc? Live in base!

Where do you want to live? What airline has bases there?

Commuting sucks. I’d avoid it if possible.

Seniority and career earnings will be far better at Brown. Living in base is less relevant when the company positions you for trips. ANC is temporary if you want it to be.

I presume your screenname indicates previous experience you believe would get you sent to 747 ANC vs. a light twin in the lower 48?

Your commute to ANC wouldn’t be long in the grand scheme of your career.. short term pain, long term gain.

My buddies at LUV bust their balls... great company, but, jeezus... y’all work too hard.

I work 11 days next month. This is the easiest job I've ever had. I'd rather spend time at home vs sitting in a hotel for 40 hrs.

Prepare the measuring tape

Live in base if at all possible. I'd choose UPS over southwest but if you are set on living in a Southwest base, then I'd work there. I recently moved to base and life is SO much better. I had a pretty easy commute (SMF-PHX). 1.5hr flight, 10 flights a day, almost never in the jumpseat. I would leave my house on average 5 hours prior to show time and i would get home on average 5 hours after release. 10 hours a week x 50 weeks a year=500 hours just going to and from work. Add in a few times we diverted on the last leg of the trip and had to spend the night. Living in base 7 miles from the airport I leave 30 mins prior to show and get home about 20 minutes after release. Career earnings are lower at Southwest but living in base will give you more opportunity for last minute premium trips.

Viper - only 10 hrs commuting per trip is decent. I know of 12-14 hr increases per trip. That's why living in base has a huge value. Leave at 3 PM? Commuter leaves their house at 0800-1000. A local is golfing, playing tennis, sleeping in, mowing the lawn, gym, etc. Trip ends at noon? A full afternoon at home. Hardly counts as a day of work. A commuter might be home for dinner.

1st rule about Southwest...

Never say anything negative about Southwest...

-Tyler Darby

Haha.

It's all relative. If you want to travel the world on the company dime and fly some bigger metal.....don't work for WN, B6, F9, NK, G4.

If you want to be home and have a good QOL....the LCC's might be more appealing.

For me, it was about the QOL. I lived in a WN base and decided I hated commuting and wasn't going to move. Would I want to fly something bigger? Sure, although the thought of sitting in a jet for 14 hours straight sounds like torture.

All these SWA vs XYZ threads are silly.

1. Where do you want to live?
2. What do you want out of your career?

Pick the airline that satisfies both answers, assuming you can get a call and get hired. It's really that simple. You won't know if you made a good call until your retirement party.

A lot of factors here, but probably boils down to do you want good quality of life now that will stay about the same throughout your career, or not so good quality of life for the next 5-ish years with great quality of life to follow? For me that broke down to wanting to spend time with my kids while they were still young, knowing I was passing on money and opportunity later on.

Single or married, kids or no, length of career, how secure are you financially, health - there are lots of factors to consider. I don’t know this firsthand, but from friends at UPS and FedEx commuting is a lot less painful, especially with senority when you can get paid for front or backend deadhead.

Fourteen hour trips at the legacy airlines come with the dreaded “9 on, 21 off” schedules. Super senior FO’s fly them. “Dozing for dollars” as half your time is spent on break. No one is forced to fly them but guys more than willingly fly them. 777 CA? Nah, I prefer being senior FO and flying the 9 on/21 off trips.”
And even the ‘short’ 7-9 hr flights are pretty easy. One flight a day is a nice gig.

What’s the timeline to be holding a good senior FO sked? Not just holding the seat, but a line like that? Is that 5-10 years or 15-20 years on property?

More like 20-25+ at Delta. The senior FOs, on the pure widebody fleets, are really senior currently. Could come down (years wise) as things transition to a younger pilot group since we had big gaps in hiring 2001-2007 and 2010-2014.

Right now it’s probsbly 28-30yrs. But for guys hired in 2014 it might be 12-15 yrs.

Living in base vs. commuting to work... to me personally, it'd be no contest. If I'm on the plane in any capacity, I'm either getting paid or going on vacation. Personal choice.

I don't care for widebody flying or multiple time zone changes. Again, personal choice.

I don't begrudge those who feel differently. Different strokes for different folks.

As for SWA vs. threads... we need SWA vs. Hawaiian thread. ;)

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have much of a widebody career when I was transitioning out of the military as a 45 year old a couple years back, but I didn’t think it was that long.

Hopefully trending better for the guys getting hired now.

I mean I’m talking the really senior guys with awesome schedules. I thought that was the question. Widebody INT can be had way junior to that but you’re not doing Rome 3 days leaving on Tuesdays every week without some serious seniority.

Interesting take. I see quicker QOL at the legacies because of the multiple aircraft and seat positions available. You can choose to stay in a junior seat and climb the list rapidly. To each their own. Great problem to have. Hard to beat having a pension plus a 12%DC (or even 9% at FDX).

The big 4 all have a DC of at least 15% starting in Jan. Most LCC's offer a DC for retirement now too.

What UPS/FedEx have that nobody else does it the A plan (pension). You'll make more at UPS and won't need to swap jets for more $ since the pay is the same.

That said, most everyone else has PBS and it's a double edged sword. Sure you can pick and choose trips that fit your monthly needs but during training/vacation months you're nowhere near the QOL that line bidding gets you.

There's plusses and minuses at any carrier. I'd just go where you think you'll feel fulfilled in your career and where your commute will be minimal to net you more time at home. If that's UPS, then go there. If that's SWA, then stay put. If its someone else....well, you get the point.

Why would anyone commute to PHX when you can drive to OAK? Oh yeah the squadron. Good move

He’s not a SWA pilot and not a Gaurd/reserve pilot...so that might be why.

I see a pension and I see a liability. Something that could be taken away at any point leaving you and your family with a huge hole in retirement income.

It’s happened at almost every airline that had a pension. What would you do if it happens the day after you retire?

Live off the money saved in your 401k and defined contribution fund?

For me personally, that’s what I would do. Because of the liability of a pension, I would be saving as much as I could in other vehicles.

But how many people with the promise of a $100,000+ a year pension would be doing that?

I don’t know the statistics on that, but I do see a lot of old airline pilots working as simulator instructors, etc after age 65. They all seemed to be legacy guys who lost a pension in bankruptcy.

Given that both UPS (12%) and FDX (9%) have defined contribution plans in addition to their DB pensions, and all have watched the legacies lose their DB pensions in 1113 proceedings over the last 17 years, I’d hazard to say virtually all.

Of course bankruptcy laws have changed since the legacies had their pensions taken...





Are they working post-65 because of need (divorces, expensive lifestyle, bad investments) or just “something to do”? Prob a mix of both...

I agree that people “should” have learned by now....but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m pretty sure there were previous cycles of boom and bust and pensions disappearing (Pan Am, TWA, etc) and that didn’t seem to cause these guys to save in addition to their pension.

So in my opinion, “virtually all” is a pretty bold statement that doesn’t match the reality of the last pilot era that went through mass bankruptcies. They are working past 65 and blame the loss of pension as the reason.

I hope my friends at FedEx and UPS never have to live through that.

The last time there were mass bankruptcies that caused pilot groups to lose their defined benefit pensions, practically none also had a defined contribution plan.

Losing the DB meant they lost all their retirement income.

UPS and FDX pilots both currently have diversified retirement income from both DB and DC plans, providing a level of risk mitigation that didn’t exist for many (most) legacy pilots in the early 2000s.

Put another way, it’d be ignorant to think pilots that still have DB plans today did not, as a whole, learn any financial lessons from the post-9/11 bankruptcy era.

Do you have any idea, have done any research into these pension plans? The structure, the funding levels?

While nothing is impossible, Fedex and UPS were still making money during the great recession. There are two ways for a company to get rid of a pension plan, and one of them is now very limited (bankruptcy), the other being the union negotiating it away. Again, while not impossible, I simply can’t see Fedex or UPS getting to the level of bankruptcy, especially when revenue and income has steadily been increasing for many years, high single digits solid and steady, with a small trough 2009-2011. Personally, I’d rather have say a 25-30% DC in lieu of a mixed DB/DC, but that will most likely never happen.

Comparing the Legacy DB wipe out with Fedex/UPS is not even in the same ballpark.

Basing, well, living in base is completely priceless!! WN is a great job, however, IF upgrade time is important to someone, I would most definitely not go to WN. You are going to sit right seat for a looooooong time, and the large amount of hiring the last 5 years would make me hesitate a bit. Very young work force.

Flying 10pm to 6am consistently is very hard on the body, takes a lot of discipline to get proper amount of rest, exercise, etc, not for everyone, regardless of $$$$$.

No right or wrong answer.

It would be ignorant to think that everyone saves extra and would be happy to lose $100,000+ per year in retirement income.

I did not make any disparaging statements about FedEx, UPS, or the state of their pension plans or business model as a whole. I actually think they are great companies and will probably do well in the future. And yes I have done the research to include reading through 10-K and other SEC filings of various airlines.

I am just saying thay if you pay attention to airline history; almost everyone goes bankrupt at some point in time and everybody loses their pension.

Pan Am, TWA, etc were some of the titans of the industry but it even happened to them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List..._United_States

You are comparing pax airlines vs cargo companies, totally different segments. The ONLY thing that airlines have in common with cargo companies is they fly airplanes. Even the yields of the airline segments are much different.

I’m not sure where you see me comparing cargo to pax operations. I never made any comparison. I simply said the history of airlines is full of bankruptcies where the companies shed CBAs and steal pensions.

Here is another list, there are cargo companies on it.

Airlines For America | U.S. Airline Bankruptcies

I hope no one has to go through this in the future, pax or cargo. But I am not going to ignore the history of this industry when it comes to bankruptcies and pensions.

I'd offer that an AI augmented cockpit driven by the liabilities associated with a hull loss caused by fatigue/error would be a more valid point of concern than a bankruptcy/loss of an A plan.

10 years ago if you told people they could buy a house on your phone, elevators, trains, and Ubers would run by autonomously...it was humorous.

Evaluate the liability associated with the typical widebody, operating over a dense urban areas, with fatigued crews at 0230, in complex airspace....that'll be what drives the investments to mature the tech to augment our cockpits with AI.

Human error can only serve to accelerate the timeline.

Thanks for the input.

The elephant in the room is the toll that working at FDX or UPS takes on one’s body over a 30+ year career. Who gives a damn if there’s a pension if a large percentage of pilots are dead by age 70. I know that for the decade I flew long haul I could feel a tangible difference in my fatigue level and overall well being. I bailed and now fly mostly domestic stuff. I’m sure that a little digging could produce the actual stats re lifespans of pilots at UAL,DAL, and AMR vs FDX or UPS. But I’d be willing to bet that freight pilots lifespans are signifigantly shorter than legacy carrier pilots.

Elephant? Cool story bro. I guess flying less than half the block hours over a 30-year career makes the lowly box hauler die sooner? I’ll take my 400 block hours a year in a widebody any day. I’m not a math guy, but 1000 block hrs a year as a pax bubba is...greater than 2x the radiation exposure? Pray tell, doctor, how is it that cargo guys universally perish at age 70?

Love to hear the uneducated stabs at cargo guys from the pax fellas. It may have been pure nights for cargo back when you rode a dinosaur to work...stick your head out of your hole and absorb some new data. Check out CURRENT bidpacks before propagating fake news.

The pension should probably be a non-factor in choosing, at least @ Purple. I’m not counting on that being there for me due to union shenanigans.

I’m sure you need to reload your quiver of Internet arrows and get back to Rachel Maddow. Cya.

Sigh...

You’ve chosen to make it personal. That’s unfortunate. For starters, I fly nowhere near 1000 hours. Closer to 550-600. Second, nobody referred to freight flying as “lowly” pilots. Your delicate sensibilities are showing. It’s a genuine concern that deserves more that a “cool story bro” juvenile response. I concede that the overall compensation package is better there. Just want those thinking about it to understand the very real health risks associated with a career of back side of the clock flying.

Take care.