regional airlines are hiring briskly!

[Varig]

Some of us have caught the industry in the upswing in the late 90s and know are out of a job. Who can say that won't happen again in the future. Jetjockey is 100% right.

 

[SkyWestCRJPilot]

Flying is a great job and I enjoy it. I flight instructed for over a year working six days a week and later flew freight for a year and a half on really lousy schedules and pay. It was fun and okay at the time. I was single (dating my wife now) and it worked out but I was getting really burned out fast. Now I'm at a regional with respectable pay and work rules. I can make ends meet as a 2-3 year FO renting an apartment for my wife and new baby. But I can't do this for all of my career and I hope to upgrade sometime and buy a house sometime too. You can fly a crappy schedule with lousy pay for awhile but it can't last. You won't be able to do it. With all of the regional airlines talking of pay cuts at Mesa-like payrates I don't see how any of us can afford to live. What will happen is this industry will be full of a bunch of young single guys that don't care about living in a crash pad and making minimum wage. If that's the case then many of us will be forced to do something else for a living to provide for our families. You've got to "pay your dues" in this industry but you can't be paying your dues forever. (No offense intended to any single guy living in a crash pad. I was one once but I'm glad I'm not anymore.)

 

[WhiteCloud]

What will happen is this industry will be full of a bunch of young single guys that don't care about living in a crash pad and making minimum wage. If that's the case then many of us will be forced to do something else for a living to provide for our families. You've got to "pay your dues" in this industry but you can't be paying your dues forever. (No offense intended to any single guy living in a crash pad. I was one once but I'm glad I'm not anymore.)

You make many good points SWCRJP. Crash pad life is fine while you're young and don't have to provide for others. A short term scene like that is reasonable but, you have to see a decent future for your family or it's irresponsible to continue.

 

[Cargoboy]

Way to put it Skywest:

I myself stuck in the cargo position now and with a family and mortgage. I want to get to the regionals and between my wife and I I think we can make ends meet, but like you said it has to be a means to an end. If there is no lite at the end of the tunnell why go further in problems and stress.
I will tell you all of you this right now. If we don't stand up as pilots and stop just bitching to one another about poor pay and never being home and how much we spend on our educations and how we are all whores. Then we are all fools and full of **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED**. We need to stand up together and push hard for better contracts and better schedules. Make the airline do its job and figure out what it should be doing to start making more money and give them a kick in the butt. Instead of turning it around and making us suffer worse and worse. If we are going to survive or make a descent living, (and I am not talking about a **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED** load of money, but descent enough so I don't have to work two jobs), we need to act and work together. I am not in the regionals or majors but one step shy of being there. Cargo running for a year now and working two other jobs and just making it, but when and if I make it to the regionals I can expect more of the same suffereing if we don't work together.
Flying is a great job. It is A LOT of responsibility for those two pilots to be in charge of. If the Airlines continue to short pay us they won't have any good pilots left. Who will want a job you can't survive on and then watch your aviation accidents go up. And I don't want to hear them say that the economy is the reason they are suffering. Half of these airlines were suffering well before the 9/11 attacks and were spinning around the drain of disaster long before that happened.
Think about it and talk with whom you work for and with other pilots to see what you can do to make your job more secure and to grow and get what is well deserving to us who worked so hard for this dream.
Good luck felles and I hope to be sitting next to one of you someday and proud to be there.

 

[PBRstreetgang]

Hey,
All the above is right, the regionals work conditions suck for a reason. TURNOVER!
If the job sucks just enough so that the single, crashpadder w/no life can stand it, until they get married, have a kid. Poof not enough money to survive(gotta have medical for the wife and kid), the 4-5th year Cpt. says enough and moves on to something else. Our company relied on turnover to control payroll costs, through controlled attrition. If any of you are thinking it's got to get better wake up and smell your roommates socks. This industry downturn still has a long way to slide and us at the regionals are already closer to the bottom than most, we are the bottom. Oh yeah, for all you that say "If you hate it so much why don't you leave?" I am looking at some previous options as we speak.
Will the last one at the regionals please turn the lights and heat off on your way out?
PBR