lesson: don't put all your eggs in one basket. You can put some in aviate program, but what if it stalls out? best to keep options open and simultaneously be looking at other opportunities. Some pilots may say "gee, I am in aviate now, I am good to go.", Others may say..."let me keep pushing and see what the market bears out for me." It can't hurt to keep pledging and pushing. I heard a kid say " do you want to get drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the 32nd round" Aviate may be a lot like that. But who knows. As long as we get high diversity numbers its all good.

Give the Aviate people a seniority number. Then they would feel like the program has actual value and something to lose. Plus, it will allow the Aviate people to be more senior to the off the street hires, who were hired while the those Aviate people swung the gear for 4-5 legs at the industry’s 4 lowest paid regionals.

And have a 20+ year military pilots come onboard below them??? Those pilots served decades enduring deployments to places people don’t want to go, while the regional pilot flew a rj and stayed in comfortable hotels for a fraction of the time. I don’t see that happening. Aviate is just a program to attract pilots to the regional network with the opportunity to significantly improve your odds of getting hired by United if accepted into the program, but you don’t work for United until your W2 says so. When your W2 says United, you get a seniority number.

For the record, many of the Aviate people at the top of the list waiting for a class date have been flying for over 25+ years as well. They have more than paid their dues. I think people who aren’t in Aviate think the majority in the program are 24 year olds. They aren’t. Some of these guys are close enough to mandatory retirement that the extra time of waiting due to Covid and whatever else is extending the wait, is putting them in the position where it may not even make sense to change airlines now. I just want to clear that up.

Regardless, to all pilots who have served, Thank you for your service!

How about it, who would have thought a year ago we’d see a sentence like this in a 2021 forum post? And it’s true.

Serious question—how many of the people like the ones you describe are left? Are there still many people in Aviate/CPP that slogged through lost decade in an RJ? My impression was that the current crop of Aviate candidates are generally younger.

I know a few that have been at the regionals for 15+ years. I don't know what deciles they are in, but I hope they can escape the regionals ASAP.

Thanks for asking this. The answer is quite a few on the Aviate list slogged through the lost decade, but I don’t know the number. The list goes by seniority within a company (for that interview period). So the top of the list is very, very senior pilots. 25+ years senior. Actually, there are very senior pilots all throughout the Aviate list. Like I said, some are coming up on mandatory retirement in the next few years. So time is of the essence.

I’m glad I could clear that up because I noticed that many assume the Aviate list is 20-somethings. Those guys are definitely there, but many of them haven’t reached all the requirements yet. There are very senior pilots all throughout the list that HAVE met the requirements (years ago) and are just waiting to transition.

The aviate team is very tight lipped about how many participants are included in new hire classes. Also my buddy was a 2014 hire and transitioned pre covid at XJT. It’s a big sample size seniority wise. When the CPP came to XJT so many got washed out by the hogan test. It was discouraging.

$25,000 question…..are YOU in the AVIATE program? With a class date? Your presence on the United threads has grown exponentially recently.

*unrelated question…..were you an engineer as a previous career? You sound like every engineer I’ve ever known.