I will give it a try..
Hi! So I have around 1400TT and it's time for me to choose the regional. I've been reading this forum for a while but still have problems with deciding where to go. I am looking for a regional where I can spend most of the nights at home (I have a newborn, want to help my wife). I know I wish for a lot... So, is there any airline which has mostly 1 or 2 day trips? I can sit on reserve for a while as well. My final goal is G4. We can move to any base we want, however we would prefer PHX, DFW or FL.(my wife is a CFI so any place with some flight schools would be great). Any advice would be appreciate. Thank you!

Airport reserve here at Horizon is almost a guarantee that you’ll be home every night. I’ve never gotten an overnight when on airport reserve. I assume other regionals are similar. The trade off is lack of flying. But it’s a good fall back if you need a month or two at home.

Well Skywest has a phoenix base that you should be able to hold pretty quickly as an FO, a Captain however will take 5+ years to hold. G4 does have a base here in Mesa, which is close to PHX, so you will have that going for you in terms of not having to move a bunch. Not sure what the hiring criteria for G4 is, so you may have to commute with Skywest once you upgrade to get the tpic you would need.

One final note about G4, from my understanding you are looking at a 3 year wait to hold Mesa, so again commuting which I hear is not a good option for G4 pilots.

Gonna be tough for a while. You might be able to luck into a situation that allows that but the long-term cost might be vast in terms of opportunity and money.

But if you're set on G4 and can move to a junior base at least for a while, you'll be able to be home every night. Might have to suck it up to get there. Tens of thousands of airline pilots have kids, and manage to deal with overnight trips.

Sounds like Silver Airways material to me. I don’t think they do many overnights. Plus plenty of flight schools for the wife.

Yep, this is #1 for me now. It's just this pay... 36$/hour is still pretty low :/ But you can't have everything. Another thing is that turbo prop vs turbo jet time. Do you think you can still get a job at LCC with turbo prop time?

This is the thing - I can move to any base I want. So I don't really have to stay at PHX. I've been thinking about silver, republic and PSA. Silver has a lot of day trips (but really low pay), heard republic and PSA have pretty nice and felxible scheduling system.

Prop time will put you at a disadvantage nowdays because there are soooo many people with glass/jet/RNP, etc experience out there. SWA at one point not too long ago hired a lot of regional prop drivers, when OO retired their last props.

it depends which LCC. I’m pretty sure Allegiant won’t mind and I know Spirit will take you as we had a couple of Silver pilots in the school house when I went through. $36 an hour is rough though in South Florida.

That's debatable. Had a bunch of dash drivers go to Delta within the last year or two at horizon...also a glass/RNP/cat 3 airplane. The experience you get flying a Q400 can't be found at any other regional (this is both a good and bad thing..lol)