I never said it was a good choice. I do not get paid to make the big decisions. That being said, I agree with you.

Agreed.......

When the aircraft are flown as hard and often as they are there, issues are going to come up. I've heard the same about the CL 300's too.

Spoke with a mechanic for Plane Sense last week as well. All sorts of issues with the Phenoms too.

No surprise. It's short-sighted to believe that doubling or even tripling an aircrafts utilization will not result in maintenance issues.

I thought Plane Sense has all PC-12s? Did you mean Jet Suite with phenoms?

The X's break a lot too. There's just less drama when a X breaks because there are 29 of them and usually a few standing by to recover a trip.

Whoops! You are right? Jet Suite. My error.

X's are not breaking as much as the other aircraft. Yet it's an always changing cycle as to which fleet type has the record breakdowns. LOL.

They're also the cheapest to park when needed. The pilot group is pretty lean right now and just because hawkers aren't all flying at once (they're also the cheapest to leave idle when needed) doesn't mean XO isn't doing well. In fact right now XO can't even operate every airplane at full tilt with the current staffing. I think they're holding out on pilot hiring until 2013 when we'll have more answers from the election, fiscal cliff, etc etc.

XO isn't the type of company to hire right up to the furlough. They can sell off as much charter as they want to their affiliates. It's easier to do that and park the cheap airplanes (Hawkers) than hire a bunch of pilots you are now saddled with for a very long time. That said I think they DO need to hire a lot more pilots and probably are just waiting until they simply can't do without them.

It should also be mentioned that while we may not be operating all of the Hawkers, we are not leaving the crews at home. Several Hawker pilots have been trained on either the 10 or the 300 and have moved on. I don't know what the long term plan is for the Hawkers, but given that their purpose here was to relieve the other fleets from flying the short-haul trips...if they are a bigger mx headache than what was anticipated, then that could explain the change in plans. The Hawkers were not intended to be money makers, rather they were to allow the bigger fleets to fly more profitable trips.

But what do we know? We're just the pilots...

Yes. They were brought in to cover the approx 30% of charter business that XO was farming out to other charter operators. I hope they continue to do so.

Whats the good (or bad) word at XO? Status quo?