There are well more than 100 pilots that are not active. Between sim instructors, ground instructors, management pilots, administration, check airmen, guys on medical leave, military leave, FMLA, etc.... there are NOT 1000 active pilots. The number of pilots that are done with IOE and active is certainly less than 750 (and probably less than that). There are guys in the mid 800's that haven't had IOE yet.

Also, there are almost always 20 people upgrading from FO to CA at any given moment and in class, so there is another 20 that are not flying the line.

So, we have 76 airplanes (+/-...using your number - not sure exactly where we are right now) and about 700ish active pilots. We are understaffed, and it can be proven by looking at the reserve utilization, the number of critical days in March, and the number of junior man assignments.

PSA is adding 3 airplanes a month, and losing about 15 pilots per month. That means that each month, PSA needs to add at least 45 pilots to break even. Everyone is expecting attrition to go up, and for the pool of qualified candidates to start to dry up. PSA will be hiring all they can for at least another 2 years to keep up with the growth and attrition.

 

Word.

By the way, why aren't you in their marketing department? You're clearly very good at this.

 

I am not trying to sell the company. I do like it, but I give honest answers. It has it's problems just like everyone else. Want to know bad stuff?...I'll tell you that as well.

 

Yes, please do.

...and in my eyes, you're not selling the company. You're just giving your opinion.

 

PSA is growing quickly and there are certainly some growing pains. Some of the instructors are very good, but some are not. The good news is that most of the bad ones are weeded out very quickly. I know that if you go to the training department and ask for a new instructor, you will get one assigned to you very quickly. The worst part is when an instructor trys to teach you his "technique" and pass it off as the only way to do it. Other guys have spent more than a decade at another regional teaching the CRJ, and get callouts or procedures confused between PSA and their old company. This can be very frustrating!

In sims, to help combat this, you are assigned a different instructor for sessions 1-4 and 5-8. That way, you can see different people. If you are not happy with an instructor, speak up. They will but another instructor in the sim with you at the very least to see what is going on. Most likely, you will get another one immediately.

There is also a great deal of "this is the way that we do it". PSA only had 400 pilots a year or so ago, and there was a small airline mentality. They didn't worry about getting some things in writing, and they are paying for it now. They are having to quickly re-write some training materials. Some things (like stalls for instance) are not well documented in the materials.

The wait time between training portions also seems to be getting to be increasing. It used to be that you could be done and out in 3 months. Now it is more than 4 months from what I heard. You are paid during this, but there is no excuse for it to take that long. The nice part is that you can get whatever base you want right now before you start IOE, and will likely be a line holder anywhere but CLT within a month of finishing IOE.

Oh, and being on reserve can really suck. That should get better with more people, but it is not fun right now. Reserve trips are a mixed bag of crap. Good thing it only lasts a couple of months.

 

Yepp, I thought the 4 month window was excessive and detrimental to everything you already learned having to wait 3 weeks to apply it, but it's def growing pains and hopefully that timeframe will come down.

Is it true that if you go in with only 25 hours of multi you can't do your oral until the end of sims as opposed to end of ground school?

 

10 Nov Indoc class. Waiting on IOE... loving the time off, looking at my phone constantly. Should be any day now, but you gotta be patient, I speculate with the new way of training, the 7/900 first that opens up more IOE slots, because there are more of those than 200's.

With that, qualified check airmen aside, would it not be out of the realm of possibility for us who have been through differences to be able to complete IOE on any airframe we're qualified on? It's gotta be approved through the FAA and management, I'm sure, but "why not?".

 

I came in with 31.8 hours of multi, went through Indoc, systems, IPT and CSI in Dayton, but had an oral exam before sims.

 

Ok, I thought that in order to be able to take the ATP checkride, whether oral or practical you had to meet the reqs. which in this case would be 50 hours of multi. That's good to hear.

 

The certificate isn't signed and complete until after the sim ride, so maybe that's why.