Just Another "Help Me Pick" Thread
 

Hello, friends.

I know that these "help me decide my next job" threads can be extra repetitive and posted by people who generally haven't searched the forum even a little bit. Despite my incredibly low post count, I have been a long-time lurker and I pinky swear that I have done extensive searching through this forum to find answers to my questions regarding where I want to go for my final airline destination. A great many of them have been answered in my searching, but I want to ask the ones that haven't. I am specifically looking at American, Delta, and United.

First, I am a captain at one of the regionals who has been doing a trans-con commute. I absolutely know that I absolutely need to stop doing that to survive, absolutely. I'm not even sure I can make it to tomorrow somedays. With that being said, I live in LA and that means that basically any major can give me a base that stops this punishment.

I am a person who, surprisingly given my intolerable commute, is driven by quality of life. And all of my questions to you fine people are related to that:

1. How flexible is your schedule really? I understand life in this industry is tied very solidly to seniority, but I am specifically looking for how flexible I can expect my schedule to be as a junior pilot...especially a junior pilot based in LA.

2. Can anyone speak to how easy it is to take a leave of absence for personal reasons here? I have taken a gap year before I got into this industry traveling the world and have aspirations to do things like climb the world's biggest mountains and volunteer abroad for an extended period of time.

3. What is the flying like out of LA? I can read the base drops for every major here and have been, but I am really looking for what I can expect if I stay in the Los Angeles area at each place.

As a final comment, I do have interviews with all three of the airlines listed. I have friends in all of them, but I wanted to spread my questions just a little bit further.

Thanks for the advice. Flame away! :)

Frontier 😜

Pick the one you're most likely to get furloughed from and you'll have plenty more gap years to come.

United LAX straight as a new hire on pretty much any of the planes.

From a UA perspective.

1. Too difficult to say what the future holds, but dropping trips is difficult. Seniority makes you get what you want. As a junior lineholder you get the leftovers, but that doesn’t last long at junior domiciles.

2. Personal leaves of absence are uncommon, but approved for good reasons. Not sure if yours meets that mark.

3. Kind of a non-answer, but depends on the fleet and seniority.

Not likely due to employment law. They have to treat all employees equally... so if they give YOU a LOA for X reason, they'd have to grant the same to every subsequent applicant. Maybe possibly UAL if you were going to serve some woke cause and they could piggy-back some brand recognition on that?

Other than waiting for a downturn and taking voluntary furlough, you'd probably need to go out on disability to get that kind of time off (but then you can't travel).

Sure you can, just on your OWN DIME.

Atlas Air has a 74 and 77 LAX base and a 76 ONT.
Major(s) narrow body pay now so don’t be too quick to burn me at the stake.

Lol. I guess he did invite the flaming, didn't he? :D

This makes sense, union labor and all.

I for one will be woke as hell if I gets me the QOL I want. Color me curious about the responses here....