ArmyRWP2018

Are you saying Piedmont will retain over 70% of new hires until they flow from today forward? That sounds unrealistic to me.

MantisToboggan

That's a flawed way to look at it. It doesn't matter how what percentage of the whole pilot group leaves, it matters what percentage of the pilot group above you leaves. If you think that the amount of people who leave in front of you is going to stay consistent as you gain seniority, you're going to be disappointed.

For your 7 years to work out, that 30% you're counting on leaving.... they all have to be senior to you up until the month you flow. Ask yourself if that's realistic

ArmyRWP2018

Look at the Attrition thread. Pretty sure I understand it slows to barely one per month at the top of the seniority list.

MantisToboggan

So then why are you making a nonsensical argument here?

2 years 10 months is what you are arguing is going to be shaved off the simple math of 705 pilots flowing at 6 per month, which equals 9 years and ten months to flow for someone hired today. 205 pilots who will always be senior to you leaving for elsewhere. The reality of the situation is, as you understand, that the majority of people leaving will be junior to you over your career at Piedmont. For that to be a reality the company would need to see probably at least 50% attrition or more of a snapshot of the pilot group right now. Just a ballpark estimate but I don't think its inaccurate

ArmyRWP2018

We start flowing at 65. So there is one year there for theoretical employee 706. The first year the will likely move up to 590. Year two will be around 450. Year three will be around 340. Here we start to slow a LOT. Year four will be around 240. Year 5 will be 150. Year 6 will be 78. Sometime in year 7 they should flow....

Based on today’s attrition numbers by seniority and flowing 66 per year. Still not 5 years. Not 9.6 years either.

A lot can change. Come to a regional, get your time, polish your apps, enjoy the beauty pageants and move on...

send a check

I sort of agree.

But I would never base my plans on attrition that is unexpected.

However we lost 10 pilots in August in a month with no flow at all. And most months we lose a minimum of 4 per month. But once you you get a year from flowing you can count on maybe .4 pilots leaving outside the flow.

Just my speculation.

60av8tor

I think adding one to the flow - 7 - is a realistic average over the course of your stay at PDT. As others have said, a couple years out, it comes to a screeching halt. I do believe anything under 8 for a new hire is a pipe dream. That’s assuming things remain the same, which is next to an impossibility over that long of a time period.

ArmyRWP2018

Of course it is a model. Which means it is an imperfect representation. Yet somehow the other two WOs unions provide some kind of estimate to the members about when they will flow. Here we are left to decipher sequence from seniority while getting a lagging newsletter about who went where......

MantisToboggan

Agreed this is probably the best methodology. Either way, there are far too many people who don't even have apps out anywhere. I don't think you should apply somewhere you won't accept, but if you want one of the big three you better have your apps out at all three. You kind of lose the right to complain otherwise

Duffman

My key takeaways are:
A) The airline is not malicious and the overwhelming majority of people (pilots, FAs, management, schedulers, dispatch, OE and sim instructors, etc) are good people
B) The airline is very behind-the-times with regard to tech, scheduling, transparency, and the contract
C) The airline is under-staffed and frequently short on reserves
D) Most of our routes are Dash routes that are now being flown with jets, so you'll do more flights for less hours, and we're limited to whatever lines mainline AA gives us.
E) Combine C) and D), and you'll see that we're doomed to inefficiency, less days off, and schedulers frequently asking for more (extensions, junior mans, etc). Add B) and you'll see that the overworked schedulers who don't have reserves to draw from can and will make split second decisions that completely screw you, but you can't look out for yourself because you have no idea what's going on.
F) The system is designed to ensure you get 11 days off and credit 80 hours. 10 days off and 95 hours if you do something for triple premium.

Training took a year from DOH to finishing OE, due to a massive training backlog. Apparently that backlog is gone and it's only taking guys 9 weeks to get through. During training they paid us 75 hours per month and gave us full flight benefits on AA, but we'd go months without hearing from the company and when we called all they'd tell us is that we were on a 48-hour leash. Sitting at home for a year was significantly better than sitting reserve in a NYC crashpad, but simple communication would've made it significantly easier to budget our study time and make any personal plans more than 3 days out, for an entire year.

After OE I only had 3 days of reserve, although I've heard that's increased to a few months for New Hires, especially in CLT. But it's safe to say you'll sit reserve significantly longer at PSA right now.

You'll probably upgrade as soon as you have 1,000 121 time, so about 13 months after hitting the line.

Being understaffed has resulted in Triple Premium. Premium is 4 hours of pay, so triple premium is 12 hours of pay, plus whatever flying you agree to do, which is a minimum of 4 hours per day of a trip, so you get 16 hours of pay for one day of work. It can be as simple as flying one leg, or it can mean sitting reserve all day. The catches are that it has to be on a day off, it's not always available, and they typically only offer it the day before, often only on their Twitter. So to get it, you have to last-minute decide to work on one of your 11 days off, call scheduling to request it, and you still may or may not get it. But it'll pay as much as a 4-day trip. I've gotten it several times and I end up crediting about 95 hours for those months with 10-11 days off.

The trips are almost exclusively 4-day trips, they start and end in the middle of the day, so they're very commutable, and we get two commuter rooms per month, so I've never had to pay for a hotel out of pocket with Piedmont. However, we have something called 'modified min day guarantee' of 4 hours per day of a trip, not per day. In what I suspect is an effort to increase the pilot coverage while working with inefficient lines handed from AA, the majority of 4-day trips credit between 16 and 17:40 hours, with very few touching 18 hours. This is where duty and trip RIG protections really hurt us; Let me show you how. This is the first trip for CAs in PHL, grabbed at random:
TOTALS BLK 1551 DHD 157 TRIP RIG: 0 CDT 1748 T.A.F.B. 8040 LDGS: 10
This means the pilot is spending 80:40 away from domicile, flying 15:51, deadheading 1:57 (I'll admit DHs are relatively uncommon), conducting 10 flights (I'd say 14 is normal), and is getting paid 17:48 (you get paid for DHs). I don't know what, if any RIG protections PSA has, but under Republic's trip RIG protections, this trip would pay well over 20 hours for 4:1 TAFB. Duty rig may increase that even further, but I'm not motivated enough to look. Now multiply that inefficiency by the average of 4.5 trips per month, and that's about 12 hours of pay per month we're missing out on, just based on a contract that doesn't punish inefficient lines, compared to other regionals. So it's a bit of a double-whammy that we have to fly inefficient lines because of Piedmont's fundamental business model, probably get the least days off of any regional, yet we don't get compensated for it, unless you count the $1.70/hr of per diem.

Now onto something called "interface." I'm not sure how other airlines do it, but at Piedmont a lot of people bid lines that have trips that carry over from one month into the next. Then their next month's schedule has a trip that overlaps with a previously awarded trip. So to cover that flying Piedmont will assign it to people who have the 1st through the 3rd of the month off. As a result, a lot (probably most) of the bid lines that have 12-13 days off end up being 11 days off. Also, if you schedule overlapping trips, it doesn't help you because they won't drop one of your trips, they'll just make you fly 6 straight days or have you fly your original 4-day trip then add a couple "standby" days, which are sitting reserve from 0500 to 1700. The contract specifies that line-holders can't get reserve days, but "standby" days are legal.

Now onto what's probably the highest risk/reward at Piedmont and their number 1 recruiting tool; flow. As others have mentioned, (720 pilots - 60 lifers)/6 flows per month = 9 years with no outside attrition. In reality though, there's lots of outside attrition. Currently, guys are flowing with 4.5 years on property, but that'll most likely slow down for the same reason there was a year-long training backlog. I've heard several people say "I'm not going to Frontier when I'm only a year from American," and Piedmont knows this. They know it's unlikely many people will ever leave for another regional, not many people within 2 years of flow will go to an LCC, and within a year of flow most people probably won't go to another major. So it's in their best interest to keep people believing the mirage is closer than it appears. However, all of the majors and LCCs are increasing hiring and I've only met one CA who doesn't have their apps out anywhere else. You'd need a crystal ball to figure out flow, but it's probably safe to say the most optimistic, semi-realistic flow for a new hire is 5 years at PDT, but with those same assumptions, it's probably 5-6 years at PSA. Also, if you worked 20 days a month at PSA I suspect you'd credit significantly more than someone at PDT doing the normal 19 days plus a day of triple.

I will say that most of the people I fly with are happy people and they love getting paid to fly airplanes. I hear about how bad things were just 5 or 6 years ago and it makes me shudder, so things have definitely come a long way for the better, but no matter how you break it down, it seems PSA will pay you more to do less.