I'll be the first to admit, I haven't followed the Great Lakes saga. The sad thing was that I made $42,000 a year flying a captain on a 19 seat turboprop back in 1994. They aren't even paying their captains that today. I wonder why they aren't attracting pilots.

Seriously! People SHUT UP about the pay and Lakes 135 ops.
I have been instructing for almost 3 years, and sick of stalls, patterns, and boring same old approaches into this airport and that, and I'm over a 1,040 total time. I remember my 3 hours of sleep and 16 hour work day for 6.80 an hour as an instructor, by the time you factor in students canceling, weather, and this and that. You end up even WORSE than lake pilots! Plus, you don't get no rest requirements as an instructor. Not to mention this new ATP rule has you needing 50 MULTI-ENGINE hours. I went to grand old UND (what a joke!) and I'm paying out of my &$* in student loans each month.

Finding multi time building isnt cheap, or does anyone meet the insurance requirements to rent a multi- airplane. It would cost me over 6 grand to get my time, which in my flight instructor pay, is not much.
I'd say I'd rather go to lakes for 30 days and pay back 7,500 dollars in monthly installments, and fly for SkyWest/Compass/Endeavor. Than to save for 4 years to pay for multi time.

Great Lakes, is doing good, who cares about the pay, and pay the dues, instructing is worse than Lakes. Not everyone is at a fine grand place instructing like Aerosim, etc. Even there the hours are bad!

Let's see what you all have to say now....

I have to say: "lolz"

Professional pilots should get paid as professionals, period. I make more flying boxes single pilot in a similar aircraft.

See, this is why we can't have nice things. Who cares about the pay? Are you kidding me? You just said you're paying down large student loan obligations. You took on that burden to learn a skill that is in increasingly short supply. Get paid what you're worth. Hint: If you're only making $6.80 flight instructing you aren't doing it right. There are much better opportunities out there these days.

Air Choice One is going to be flying Ironwood, MI to ORD. About 300 miles that leg will be in a Caravan and they pay their FOs $18 an hour. Not saying this is anything special but how does lakes think they're going to be able to remain competitive as more of these actual 135s pick up their routes with lower cost operations?

Multi time isn't even much of an issue anymore. Eagle told me they will let you start training with 25 multi. An AWAC recruiter told my coworker that they'll let you in with 32.

Yes, plenty of places rent seminoles to low timers. I've been renting a seminole since I passed my checkride. Get together with someone and split time/cost. Take up friends/family and have them chip in.

Agreed. My last 8 months of instructing, I made $32k. That's twice as much as a Lakes F.O. makes in a year. Maybe, just maybe, Redbird, you can do some legwork on your own instead of waiting for it to be handed to you. If you like Aerosim so much, move there. I got 1400 dual given at a FL flight school in less than a year and a half because I worked my tail off looking for a good job instead of waiting for it to fall in my lap.

I assume you meant that for flyund83.

Yeah. I messed that up. Should've taken 6 seconds to make sure I was chastising the right person