Berry Aviation
 

Hi Folks,

I am considering applying here and/or with Contour Airlines. I currently have 500TT 100ME CFI IR ASEL/AMEL

Cans someone message me how the salary & overtime (if any) works? How is the schedule? I’d be considering the BNA base with Contour and the Denton, TX base with Berry.

Also how many hours do you average per year? My goal is to get to 1500 and move on, trying to decide about staying a CFI or moving on? How involved are the pilots in loading/unloading the cargo of the airplane?

Thanks in advance.

I would definitely recommend getting some multi-turbine experience until 1,500 then jumping to regionals if you're young. Pay at Berry is around $50-55k for the roughly 2-3 years you would stay there. Salary plus miles puts you somewhere in that ball park. No real schedule, but can be broken down as 5 on 2 off, 5/2 5/2 12/2, and repeat. You're on call 24 hours with a 30 minute call out to the plane.
Hours vary depending on what's going on in the year, but for planning, expect in the ball park of 500/year.
You are 100% responsible for loading and unloading before and after flights. Anywhere from 20lbs to 7,000lbs of a payload. Some are on pallets which is easier, other times it's a plane full of dogs and cats one by one.

CFI is much more relaxed and brings you home every night. Hard to beat that. But when you hit your ATP mins, you have no real world experience to show for it. Berry is tough and will outright suck at times, but you will leave to your regional class date (or wherever your heart is set on) and outperform the majority every single time.

Berry’s pay scale is listed on the profile page of this site and gives average miles of 155,000 (point to point, straight line distance in SM). So you get a base salary of $32k + $15.5k mileage = $47.5k. That’s an average, could be more, could be less. Day Off pay means if you are away from home on a sat/sun you get $200 each day. It works out to roughly every 4 weekends you’re required to be “on call”. There is no overtime but I guess you can consider picking up weekends as Overtime, however, FOs typically do not want to give up weekends because that’s $400.

On Demand Cargo is feast/famine style. You may have 10 days running around on minimum rest followed by 10 of sitting at home doing nothing. Paychecks vary too because of this.

If all you want to do is get your 1,500 hrs and bounce, that’s fine if you are up front with that and put in their handshake agreement of 1 year. Hours vary too; one year could be 300 the next could be 800+. 2021 is looking to shape up as one of those 800+ years. Getting hired at 500 hrs is unlikely without an internal recommendation, but doesn’t hurt to try. If it’s a good year, You’ll make more as an FO at Berry than a regional.