I currently fly for a regional and am looking to make a jump to the fractionals. Leaving white plaines the other day, I was on the bus with a NetJets pilot who said he commuted to work from STL to DFW. He was a new hire at NetJets so he falls into the new contract. I thought that you had to live within a certain time/distance from your base.
Nope. You receive a briefing the afternoon/evening before telling you what time your report is. It won't change, and there will be no 2am phone calls. All you have to do is make it there by your briefed showtime; they don't care where you live at all. That goes for pilots on the reserve schedule as well. And if by chance you're called in to sit airport standby on your first day of work and they don't use you, you're provided a hotel at your domicile.
Wouldn't it be prohibitively expensive to pay your own way to commute to work?
It could be, but keep in mind also that you'll know your schedule indefinitely once you're on the 7/7, and thus can purchase discount airline tickets way in advance. Plan on going the day before, and using hotel points for a free room at your domicile.
I priced out a STL-DFW one-way for late February, and it was only $64 including taxes. And while you have to report to your base, the company can send you anywhere you like at the end of the tour (up to the value of the original ticket "home"), assuming you're not actually flying a company aircraft back to domicile. (Which is pretty rare.) So it's definitely doable.
I'm doing it by car; 2.5 hours from central Florida to KPBI. Yeah, the gas adds up, but I'm only doing one roundtrip every other week on the 7/7 schedule. If you drove 15 minutes each way to a cubicle-slave job 5 days a week, it'd be the same amount of driving.
Is it worth commuting to one of these companies?
I think so. Better wages and terrific benefits -- it blows my previous company (a non-union regional) out of the water. I'm still new, and haven't really seen the ugly side, but I'm sure it's there like any company. But so far, the best day at my previous company hasn't compared to this.
Still, commuting stinks no matter how you look at it. Though I came here knowing I might be stuck with the domicile system forever, I'm sure that's going to be a big negotiating point for the next contract. Keep in mind, though, that this contract isn't amenable until November 2010, so it's going to be quite a while before it changes.
