Stay away!
Not many/any? day trips. Very inefficient schedules. You will spend a lot of your trip flow sitting at the overnight or sitting in Boston.
Example Trip flows:
63F: Friday-Sunday= fly two hours, spend Friday, Saturday and Saturday night at the outstation, fly two hours back on Sunday.
85: Crew call at 1855, fly 1.9 hours, overnight over sixteen hours, fly 1.7 hours the next day and duty off at 1500.
87: Crew call at 1120, fly 1.9, overnight for over 14 hours, fly 1.7 back and duty off at 0600.
etc, etc, etc...you will not fly 90 hours/month at Big Sky
Crew Scheduling is reactive, not proactive and a total mess. You usually have to submit more than one extra flying form before you finally get paid for extra flying. Story time: New FO finishes IOE. He's told to stand-by while skeds works him onto the line. FO sits by the phone everyday waiting to find out what his schedule will be. Seven days go by before he is put onto the line. Later, when said FO asks skeds for his seven moving days, they inform him that those seven days he was sitting by the phone were his moving days.
Reserve lines are not commutable.
No CASS so commuting has been a nightmare this summer.
Big Sky has yet to pay out the promised hiring bonus to anyone.
Newest Street Captains have been flying in the right seat this past month.
Big Sky will take out MA state taxes from your pay regardless of where you live. Payroll has yet to figure this out.
I don't know if they are enforcing the training contract.
Training: 3.5 weeks of ground school. Streets get paid as FO's during ground school. Rat-Hole-tel paid for with two to a room. Creepy Jerry at the front desk is no extra charge. There is no syllabus for class so don't bother asking for one. Indoc is instructor reading the Op and Standard manuals straight off the laptop's word document. Huge homework covering the Op Specs pertaining to the company passed out and takes hours and hours to complete if you do it by yourself. In some classes this homework is taken up, some classes it's graded in class, and in some classes they forget about it entirely. Most of systems class was spent telling us what was wrong in the various systems books. Instructors swap out depending on their individual schedules, but with no syllabus, they never know what's been covered already so there is a lot of skipping around and last minute..."Oh we forgot to cover" Everything is done at the last minute so you won't know what your oral or sim schedule is until the end. There is a constant threat of an exam over memory items. Some classes take this exam, some don't. Hotel still provided until end of Sim is eight days with one day off around day five or so. Two different sim locations in the Denver area. You'll go to one or the other. After sim you have aircraft training back in Billings. A/C training takes forever because you have to wait for a plane to be too broke to go to the overnight, but not too broke for you to train on. Training will try to make you stay in Billings the entire time...even if you don't do anything for a week. CA did 38-40 hours of IOE in Billings and then sent to Boston. (Brilliant!) FOs did their IOE in BOS.
I curse the day I answered the phone.
