Ground / Simulator instructor
 

Is spirit still doing the 2yr ground instructor to FO thing?

If so, anyone know what the pay is?

Thanks

Pay is criminal from what I’ve been told. They aren’t bringing in people for this gig for their industry experience, they are bringing them in to work for almost nothing for the promise of a job in 2 years.

Reminds me of the Gulfstream “pay to fly” they didn back in the day

Spoke to the guy that does GS REC in LAS, he said he was okay not going to the line on 1st year pay, because that would be a paycut. FWIW

Completely incorrect. It pays very well.

I literally just finished training yesterday. My sim partner was one of those “instructors”. They were making $50-60k. It’s not garbage pay at all.

Now... when this place is hiring 56 a month your going to be working your ass off like no other. They were here back during the last big wave and it was pretty rough.

Nice to see the pay has seemed to have increased from what the Riddle kids got to instruct in the past.

I believe there are two different levels of ground instructor. There are the low time, younger entry level. They do basic indoc, and the initial device training. If there are not enough students, they get farmed off to HQ to work on projects.

Then there are the older more experienced Senior ground instructors. They can do the same stuff as the entry level, BI, device training, but also typically do recurrent ground school. I think they are the ones doing recurrent gs in DFW and LAS, maybe as local hires?

I'm sure there is a basic contract, but if you have more experience, you might be able to negotiate. There is at least one recent ground instructor who brought a lot of 121 sim experience who made it to the line in less than two years, but not the norm.

Seniority is based on being hired as a pilot. As a ground instructor you will go through training and get typed.

The program has been around long enough that there are now former ground instructors who are now line captains working as sim instructors.

I might be wrong but I thought they started at year 1 pay and bottom of the list on the day they join the pilot group.

Interesting. So he feels he “could” get hired today and build seniority but would rather hang in the training department with no seniority being built, because of the first year pay. Got it. Not like he is gaining seniority in the classroom.

Feel free to ask him yourself, the impression I got is, based on 2 minute chat at the end of rec last month: no building of seniority for bidding etc, but seniority for pay and vacation, he was delayed getting a class to fly against his wishes but because of pay based on initial doh, no biggie.