Guard to the Regionals
 

I’m a guard F-16 guy and my full time seasoning orders are going to be ending here in a couple months and I’ll be going part time with the guard and looking to transition to the airline world and am seeking some advice and guidance.

In total I’ll have about 850 hours, 500 of which is PIC, and be 4-ship FL qualed when I go part time so obviously I’ll have to spend some time in the Regionals to build my hours for the majors. My ultimate goal is to get to the majors as quickly as I can.

The advice I’ve been given so far is to try and get on with a regional with the quickest upgrade to build my total PIC time.

As of right now that is going to be my plan going forward, in addition to staying sharp in the Viper.

Does anyone else have any additional advice or recommendations? Or something else I could be doing?

Any/all guidance is much appreciated

From what has been recommended in other threads, your plan seems good. When did you start UPT, just out of curiosity.

I started UPT back in Sept 15’ and graduated Oct 16’

So, finished FTU sometime in the Spring of 2017? Unless you had prior time, you must have flown your ass off in the last year or so. Any deployments in there or just normal training at home?

Yea, I finished FTU at the beginning of 2017. We got an upcoming deployment so I’ll get a good chunk of hours from that. But I have been flying a bunch. I pretty much volunteer for any additional flying opportunities and TDYs that I can, mostly just because I love to fly but getting the hours is nice too. I also work in the scheduling shop so I make sure to throw myself in as many lines as I can (especially when we’re hitting the tanker!)

I would be just a little bit more selective about regionals than "fastest upgrade". Some of them are pretty toxic work environments, and those are potentially more likely to get sideways if you do more than one weekend/month of mil, which would be a problem for you. You would win that battle, but you don't need the aggravation.

The good news is that upgrades are fast almost everywhere right now, so shoot for a regional with a junior pilot domicile very near your guard base (or co-located with if that's possible).

Do your homework before selecting any regional. Most of them will work you to the bone these days (pilot shortage), but some of them have truly toxic cultures... no point in subjecting yourself to that unnecessarily. Also ensure you understand their training program... some of them just throw ten candidates on the wall and hope a few stick. There's a lot of luck and personality involved in that sort of program, so no amount of work ethic or fighter pilot kung-fu will guarantee success (you don't need an FAA pink slip on your record obviously).

There have been a lot of threads here about this situation, so I’m trying to get some specific data points, so excuse my many questions.
How do you go from UPT graduation in Oct of 16 to finishing FTU in “at the beginning 2017”. When did you do IFF? Is F-16 FTU still around 6 months long? Can you be more specific about your actual timeline and when you returned to your unit to start MQT? Did you have any prior civilian hours before starting UPT?

Consider a regional with flow to a major, but not if it would make a difference about having to commute.

Joe

Thanks for the words. I’m 100% in agreement with you on choosing a regional based on domicile location. That’s also one of the biggest factors in my decision. As of right now I have a relatively short list of companies that I’m interested in, all of which have domiciles that are driving distance to my guard base.

No worries, and I apologies, I actually graduated UPT in 2015. I was wondering why my timeline wasn’t making sense in my head when I originally said 2016.

But here’s my approximate timeline

UPT: Sept 2014- Oct 2015
IFF: Feb 2016- Apr 2016
FTU: May 2016- Feb 2017
MQT: March 2017- Jun 2017

And the length of the FTU varies. My class did ours in ~8.5 Months but I have some bros whose class took them almost a year. It kinda varies based on the FTU base (at least it did when I was going through it) but in general I’d say the average was about 9-10 months.

I had about 100 hours and my PPL before going to UPT.

If you have any other questions let me know