Snakum
How's your marmott?
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2002
- Posts
- 2,090
Huck said:I remember the nineties: beating doors in 1992, trying to find free-lance work with 120 former Eastern guys doing the same thing in BHM.
Richard Scrushy (of Healthsouth fame) had 4 jets and nobody on full-time. He had ~10 guys working part-time 5 days a week, no benefits. Some had kids.
I knew a guy flying a BE-200 solo for $40k a year. A retired Army guy undercut him and got the job for $30k and no benefits.
Nobody hired, other than SWA and Valujet, until about '96. When I started at ASA in '95 I had 1500TT, 500 turbine and was the least qualified in the class - there were two ex military guys.
My favorite memory: I was begging for a job at Trans-South (it was taking 2000 hours to get a C210 job) and met an ex F-4 guy. He was driving a courier truck, waiting on a flying slot to open up. He'd been driving that Chevy Luv for 7 months.
Yeah, I remember the nineties. As Kurt Vonnegut said - there are no good old days, just days.....
When I first started flying regularly in 1996, I remember my CFI explaining that because "things were changing for the better" he'd only have to teach for about 1500 hours before he could go to Ram Air for a couple years before hitting the regionals. He said that "until recently" (1996) the only way to get a Regional turbo-prop job was to pay for the training after you had "2500 hours or so". One of the CFIs who worked there part-time had instructed for three years, flew freight for two in CLT, and had been "lucky enough" to get on with Simmons (AE) at 3000 + hours.
Yep ... good times.