Its always been difficult and basically a crap shoot to get on here. Reduced numbers will only make matters worse.

 

The original poster said he picked up a lot of open time to get to 270k. If he did that on an international fleet, he could make much more than 270k

 

The bottom line is that he isn’t making 270K with 15-20 days off / month -> we have to assume these are his bid awarded days off, not actual. To the OP, if you want $270K with 14/28 off*, get on at UPS and after 8 yrs or so you’ll be there with appx 400 block hours per year max.

*With conflict bidding, vacation use, and other contractual advantages (eg. taking advantage of positioning and repositioning DHs&CMLs), your actual days at home will be less than 14/28. If you conflict bid every bid (7x per year) and get a couple days out of each, that’s a day off the average, now 13/28. Sneak home early on a couple depositionings, conflict a day or 2 with training, and you’re dropping it even further. There is some balancing out though - an occasional late arrival, lost day for commuting, training on days off - seniority takes care of most of that.

 

270k with weekends and 18 days off? Wanna trade positions? I think you would be nuts to leave that to come here at your age. Plus DAL pretty much just guaranteed a new contract with a big raise for you. We on the other hand won’t see any improvements for years.

 

Yes please. Share. Year 5 pay and will probably end up around $230k. 1 JA, pick up very little open time, 10 out of 13 pay periods will be at guarantee (close enough).

 

That is secret sauce . For non Brown folks who don’t know, our reserves get
paid guarantee (75 hours) for 14 days of work out of 28 days in pay period (more to it but that is basics). If you pick up any trips in days off, they get paid at straight time in top of guarantee.

So if you live in base, for conversation purposes, say you only get used 50% of the time, and you pick up say 2 turns paying 6 hrs each, that gets you to 87 hours of credit, and so forth. So it depends if you call your reserve days not being used days off.

But good illustration how to make $$$ and not work too hard, living in base. For commuters, probably not a good scenario unless you like sitting in a crashpad and having to commute in for trips picked up.

And to the point made by someone else, crediting 100 hours a month consistently is not easy and probably not what the average pilot wants to be doing.

 

He did a few posts ago. Doing the sit reserve then pickup on days off deal. True, IF you live in domicile and IF you don’t get called out too much on reserve days you can certainly make some serious coin doing this. Caveat is that if you don’t get called out a lot there is usually not much to pick up on days off either. Separately, some ANC new peeps apparently made out pretty good with all the premiums we used to have and constant late arrival pay mixed in with a conflict here and there. You just can’t count on either of these.

 

I did much better than expected for my ~year of Arctic Exile. I think it was something like 65k. I believe those days are pretty much over, though. Also, based on the system bid, I would not expect to hold SDF anytime soon if coming aboard now. I'm junior enough to be sweating the potential displacement bid from potentially parked MDs...

 

2nd yr, OP + 30k , 74, picked up some extra. pay checks seem to be very fleet dependent. I enjoy my 5-14 days off. If I only had 2 days off all the time I'd probably quit. Commuting is fine.

 

Coming up on 2.5 years and I'm enjoying the big blocks of time off. Granted - I sometimes go to work for two weeks. My last vacation was 35 days off with 7 days of vacation.

Trip trading here is a total wreck. Company holds all of the cards and there is no union oversight to keep tabs on the stats. If the trade is contractual and FAA compliant it can be denied. You can be denied for insufficient reserves. And you can be denied for sufficient reserves. For yearsss if you wanted your denied trip trade manually reviewed over the weekends they wouldn't do it. Staff and tech was there - they just wouldn't do it. Nothing better than the company response being - trip has already been picked up by a different crew member.

Last week they finally decided they would be available to look at them for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday. Thanks to the IPA on that one. I would have better QOL if trip trading wasn't so unreliable.

The company recently implemented this new Jepp crew tracking software and it's been a total mess. It has caused so many issues for crew members. The IT we use to interface with the company is now more difficult and problematic.