First year regional pilots “considering” applying to spirit. Our pay isn’t that bad.

 

But that E-175!!

 

Mesa must be awesome if you are just “considering” Spirit.

 

This is just plain ignorant. Why would the pilots want to waste negotiation capital on making things easier for their own company to attract pilots during a shortage? The company should be spending negotiation capital on making it easier to attract pilots.

I realize that the new hires want better pay--but your logic is flawed beyond repair.

 

Perhaps we’d like to fly with collective group of more qualified pilots. Not that we don’t get qualified guys now but if you look at say the year before the contract was signed we still were able to fill seats and some of those guys were good but we got a much larger group of “interesting” and low time folks than we would have. It’s slowly trending that way again I would expect with the hiring push but don’t have real data to support it.

 

Spirit is going to attract Spirit type pilots.

We are a growth airline, with a pretty decent quality of life. Our new order secures another decade of expansion, and I doubt that will be the end of it.

It’s not a fancy product, and telling your neighbors who you fly for at a dinner party doesn’t get the ooh’s and ahh’s that a legacy pilot would, but people here don’t care. They are content waving at those same neighbors heading to work while they pull the toys out of their garage which are paid off because they can drop half the month to enjoy them.

I don’t believe a $20-30 an hour first year pay bump will directly translate to an incrementally higher class of new hires. The young Deltoid rookies that I see strutting around LGA, ATL and DTW never had us on their radar. SWA gets their prototypes and they are happy to be there.

On the line here, it’s pretty difficult to find people who are not content with their decision to be here. They came at $36 and hour, they came at $56 an hour, and we will get the same types at $86 an hour. Plenty of people want to be here.

That’s not to say I’m against any improvements to first year life, but the broader focus should be on what would make this airline a smart career decision for the 20-35 years that follow year one.

 

Sounds like you already listed your reasons why this is a smart career decision for you, and I see a lot of attitudes like that on the line. Their disdain for the legacies is their "reason" for being here, they make more money than they used to, and they're not on reserve so they don't care what's going on there since they paid their dues.

 

Pretty solid post and I believe it to be pretty darn accurate

 

Bottom line is the guy on 5th year Capt pay making more than 250k (W2 wages only) is an outlier. You have to be working your arse off and getting lucky. He was talking to a guy interested in Spirit and making it sound normal, which it’s not. Every airline has the guys who have great gigs (instructors, in base and slobber all the open time, etc). Bottom line is they are outliers. The way you calculate expected pay is take the hourly rate and times it by 1000. To do more than that you will have to work extra period!

 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you currently work for FedEx? Should I opine on what guys make at FedEx, being that I have no idea what I’m talking about?

I know many guys who make north of $250k, various bases, aren’t instructors, and have a great QOL. Of course guys aren’t making that at guarantee, anyone with a calculator can do that simple math. But I assure you plenty of us are making north of $250k, and still plenty of time off.

Should a new hire plan on that? Heck no, should guys that made $280k this year expect the same next year, probably not, depends on staffing; but let’s once and for all end this ridiculous notion that a Spirit pilot making a quarter mil a year is somehow some weird “outlier”.