Gasfiltered

No.

The captains at OWB are base-locked and plan to stick with CA for awhile and there is already a spare captain there. The FOs there have seniority numbers 50-75 spots over new hires and have still some time left to upgrade. If you're coming in as an FO, you would not be realistically able to outbid anyone until after you were upgrading as a Capt. If you're coming in as a captain, you're 200 seniority numbers down from guys that are raising families and have mortgages there. You can just assume OWB is pretty much off the table.

Gasfiltered

Send an email to your jumpseat coordinators. Also go on the company website and fill out the forms for your family. You, your spouse, your minor children, and your parents (not your in-laws). You are free domestically. You may have to pay the taxes on your family. The chief pilot will give you a briefing on how to do all of this if you pass training.

Gasfiltered

This all may have changed since I left, but within the last year, this is how it worked. The incentive programs change with the seasons. Each day you cover as an incentive day is valued differently, usually between $3-600, plus overtime, plus you get paid double-block time if you fly more than your line minimum per week. So, if your line has a 40-hour min. you get paid for 40 hours even if a hurricane wipes out your whole schedule. If you fly 41 hours, you get paid for 82 hours. If you work an extra, non-incentive day, but don't break 40 hours block time, you get your 40 hours plus time and a half for the duty hours on your extra day. If you sign up for an incentive day, you get your 40 hours, plus time and a half on your duty time for the extra day, plus the incentive payment. If you want to make a ton of money you are going to work to the very limits of safety and fatigue. You're flying single-pilot, hard IFR in a 40 year old piston twin with an AP that doesn't work when it's bumpy, or when there's too much cross wind, with a single set of steam gauges, a single Garmin 430 that usually doesn't have adsb, maybe a monochrome radar that maybe works, and boots that are more patch than boot, you'll be at MGW (often 200 and sometimes 5-600lbs over that so you don't have to bump a pax, nobody checks the W&B, you can be as creative as you like), in busy airspace for 6, 13-hour days in a row, with 1 day off and then doing it again. If you're in the northeast, that 13 hour day will have you on 8-10 legs into Boston or New York or both and you can count on anytime other than peak summer that you'll be shooting 8-10 approaches. The people that have been there for 20 years get the luxury of only 6 legs/day and they make enough to only take maybe one extra day a week. You can ask them all about their first engine failure. And then their second. Or third.
The good news is that everyone in the airline industry knows this and Cape Air pilots enjoy a very good reputation as stick-and-rudder guys.
The bad news is that, IMO, you can only dance with the devil for so long and for years CA has gotten away with giving him a peck on the cheek and a fake number. The recent, rapid expansions combined with some large purchases has moved the company faster than management has been able to keep up. Again, only my personal opinion, but the planes and the pilots are at the very limits of exhaustion and there is a culture disconnect between what the management pilots think the culture is and what it actually is. I have a tremendous fear that the pressure to complete EAS routes regardless of conditions (planes, pilots, weather) is going to result in a catastrophe sooner rather than later and this has only been exacerbated recently with buying a whole other airline and with needing to pay the bills for the new planes. You'll be asked to make a plane that should have been a beer can decades ago do things to compete with the on-time performance of a modern jetliner. Lately, they've gotten people to do this as street captains by sponsoring visas and by hiring people who can't get hired by larger airlines. Every time one of those captains makes a go/no-go decision, he has the spectre of deportation hanging over him, it's an impossible position to be put in and I've seen some spectacularly bad decisions being made. I do want to reiterate this is all my personal opinion, and my personal observations, there are a lot of people very happy with it who may not have had my experiences. My background is in an industry with a lot of risk, where a mistake could result in biblical loss of life events; preventative risk management was a core tenet of every moment so my personal tolerance for lackluster risk mitigation is very low. By and large everyone there is actually great to work with, the CPs have a genuine open-door and they have a genuine interest in you and your life and your family. There's a good chance the CEO knows your name on sight if you're based in the northeast. Almost all of the management were line pilots. The biggest problem is they were line pilots when CA was a dinghy in the harbor. Now it's an aircraft carrier; their experience as line pilots is almost irrelevant to the current experience of a line pilot 1000 miles away on an EAS route. They fly an occasional line in the summer on non-EAS routes and it's almost assured that ops is not giving them a bit of trouble over delaying a flight. There is a very strong culture of not reporting or intentionally under reporting things which gives these excellent CPs a false sense of the state of things. For example, an encounter with severe turbulence (an unfortunately not uncommon event given the need to maintain those contracts where we compete with people flying planes at 10x the weight and which were designed as airliners) requires the plane to be written up and inspected and other flights into that airport will be delayed until conditions improve. Well that's a lot of paperwork and you have to have a call with the CP to explain why you flew into an area which was likely to have SEV and you don't want to throw operations under the bus for pressuring you to complete an EAS flight and you don't want your buddy to be stranded away from his car, so you don't mention it and you send your buddy a text and now it's his call and you didn't need to do any paperwork. The plane is 5 knots slower the next day at the same weight/same power/same temp, but surely it isn't bent. I've seen pilots depart into IMC without a functioning primary instrument (keep in mind there are usually only one set of gauges, no co pilot gauges) because they didn't want to be stuck at an outstation. I've seen pilots fail to report grounding issues for entire duty cycles because they didn't want to get stuck with a different plane they didn't like as much. Common practice before writing a plane up for any maintenance issue, regardless of severity is to check which planes are currently up and unassigned to make sure you don't get an even bigger lemon. This all happens under the radar of management, who will tell you emphatically, and mean it, to write it up. I'm completely open to the idea that I'm just naive and this is how all airlines stay in business, but I hope not. I really wish the ground truth was the same as management wants it to be, and for the most part the non-EAS routes are that. Every airline is going to pressure you to complete any flight you possibly can, as they should, but at CA you will get that pressure when you are alone, in an old plane with a lot of undocumented deferred maintenance, in a very high-workload environment, and at the limits of fatigue. I had a lot of great days there, but the bad ones were exceptionally bad. I'm not in any way saying you shouldn't work there, just be comfortable with the fact that you will fly for many hundreds of hours with a single point of failure between you and an NTSB report and often that single point will be you, on minimum rest, alone over mountains at night in continuous icing with a plane load of people who have no idea.

Cidgrad130

My first question to you would be "how long ago did you leave?" However, the events you describe paint a picture of a terrible safety culture and a broken SMS. Pilots flying into IMC single-pilot with pax with known primary instrument failure has so many levels of failures that it is hard to comprehend how an operation could get to that point.

What is at the root cause of the systemic non-reporting culture? Is this still the case today. Surely the organizational pressure to meet performance goals of EAS routes can't be worth accepting the types of risk exposure that you describe. Has management found a way to offer financial incentives to pilots who are willing to accept higher risk? I can partially understand that pilots employed under work-visas may feel some kind of pressure to not write-up known mx items or make a go/no-go call...but what kind of message is sent to the new-hires during indoc and initial training? Does the SMS include an opportunity for anonymous hazard reporting? Are these reports shared with the pilot group?

The incidents you anecdotally describe also indicates that they have the wrong people performing the captain role. Leadership, PIC decision-making, and Thread and Error Management must not be included in the Captain upgrade training...

I've talked with a few former and current CA pilots and have never heard this kind of feedback before. I agree that single-pilot IMC with dated equipment can lead to trouble. I would have thought it safe to assume that CA has a pretty robust safety culture and fleet maintenance program to successfully pull this off.

Are there any current CA guys on the forum that have a different opinion on the safety culture?

BravoTango

I was at Cape for a few years up to 2019, and while there is a touch of truth to some of this, in my experience this is quite an exaggeration. Training was strong, maintenance was taken seriously, the safety systems were in place, and I never once felt any pressure to be unsafe or fly with anything broken. If I said I wasn’t going I wasn’t going. Sure the airplanes are old, yes piston engines fail way more than turbines. That’s why you have 2!

I’d concur that it takes a robust safety culture and good maintenance and training to pull off these operations. Cape flies idk 250 flights a day in multiple regions day in day out including places with ice and mountains. For over 30 years now. Zero passenger fatalities.

Just my experience. It’s of course not perfect, but they care and they do a good job. Pilots washed out of training all the time - standards aren’t cut. Cape pilots are well regarded. And hopefully the new planes are in place soon.


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tlove482

So many things wrong with this post unless things have dramatically changed since I left. First, if you're flying over gross then you're doing it wrong. You mentioned engine failures. It barely flies at max gross. I'd hate to see single engine performance over gross. Weight and balance is your responsibility as the captain. You can either make it work or you can't. Bags get bumped or passengers get bumped.

Most of the problems in your post are poor PIC decisions. If you can't turn down a flight because of broken equipment, that's on you. If you count multiple calls to see if you can go as pressure, then sure there is some. I took it as them checking to see if conditions had changed. If they hadn't, then my answer was still no. I never felt like my job was in jeopardy for delaying a flight for weather or writing stuff up. There were a couple of times that the flight never went because the weather didn't clear and so they bussed the passengers to the destination. Never heard anything else about it. I enjoyed my time there and it opened up a lot of other flying opportunities for me.

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hyperboy

is Kirksville a junior base?

ManuTahiti

Trying my chance, but does anyone know of any hired street captain who went through the OMS Green card sponsoring program with 9K ?
I’ve tried to research the topic as much as I could, making sure these aren’t empty promises. It’s just tough to find testimonials of folks who have gone through the program successfully.
any help is greatly appreciated
thanks

BravoTango

I’ve met a couple and more are coming on board. Impression is all is legit and people are happy. Management is very ethical in my past experience. But this is just second hand.


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TheGodfather

You guys still hiring?