You're worried and asking before you're even hired. This should tweak your senses and judgement.

 

Why would you want a job where you have to work on your days off to pay the bills? What is the point of having a family if you never see them?

Find a job that pays your bills and still allows you to be home.

 

Is it a long wait to get an LAX base?

 

you cannot go below 8(or 9 I cannot recall)days off per month and you only get 11 on reserve. that said, you can try to go beyond 75 hrs by working your tail off but you will be hating life for sure. Staffing looks to be so bad that you will certainly be able to pick up open time but it cannot start before or end later than published times so as not to interfere with your reserve days. no easy answer. many FO's have had to mow grass or use other skills or marry the right person to feed the aviation habit. not to be a downer but suppose aviation gets hit with another 9/11 type event or some other carrier specific event that could force you to suck it up and start from scratch. are you gutsy enough to get in? I am not offering this to be sarcastic, believe me. it happened to me and the war stories, though exciting make me doubt the wisdom of putting it all on the roulette wheel we call a pilot career.

 

Junior FO currently is a 10/07 DOH, but Eagle just announced some pretty significant expansion in LAX so that might improve.

 

Unless someone was still really young, say 23-25, I could not reconmend anyone going to the regionals unless you have no bills or a sugar mama...

I was lucky and got in at 22 and had 6000+ hrs before I was 30, which made it easier to move on to other better paying jobs. Made just enough for beer money and some food. But I was still 7 years away from kids, marriage, mortgages etc....If you have a family,especially with kids, think really hard about it..

There are just too many negatives that can happen that will derail your plans of better pay in the future. At which point you may be faced with the thought of having to start over again at another regional, unless a company like Netjets is hiring, but it appears that safety net has a hole in it also.

 

^^ What he said. There's no way of knowing with any degree of certainty how long you'll be on reserve but you can bet on at least a year unless you're willing to commute to SJU. Take it from a guy who's been on reserve at Eagle for a couple years now, it's possible to break guarantee but it's not common and it's not something you have much control over. You can pretty much forget it in the winter.

Picking up OT is an option but as others have said, it's tough on reserve and even tougher if you commute. The most you could pull off would probably be one 2 day or maybe a 3 day trip per month if you swap your days off around (which can be impossible in and of itself), you're lucky and the stars are aligned. That said, staffing is typically fatter during the winter months and OT is harder to come across then if it's not blocked completely.

 

OT is hard to pick up and we never fly our guarantee - and OT is usually not unblocked for FO's...we have too many on RSV right now.

 

Yea, just think. You could stay with the regionals for 3-4 years and have tons of guys under you on the seniorty list. Then you get tired of that kind of flying and go to NetJets. After 18 months at NetJets you find yourself on the Furlough list there wishing that you never left the regional flying.

Life is not always "Greener" on the other side.

 

Per Diem pay is NOT non-taxable. It is not withheld if the sequence contains an out of base overnight - this is why you may have 2 colums in your end of month stub: TAFB W (withheld) & TAFB NW (not-withheld). Come tax time you have to report the total per diem you rec'd and you can either itemize receipts for trip expenses or use the GSA standard rates and subtract your expenses from your per diem payments to get the taxable amount.