Hi There TooSlow,
Hey, good question......not sure I have the definitive answer, but maybe I can shed a little light on things......
Post 911 has seen some real changes in the hiring requirements everywhere with all the experienced pilots walking around.........
The minimums that are stated aren't usually close to good enough now to get you looked at while pre-911 they might have even been willing to bend things a little for you if they needed pilots.....That's the general answer.......
Net Jets does not officially require turbine time, but the guys walking in the door now have thousands of hours and most of them have significant turbine time. We have furloughees from USAIR (737, 727, Airbus and whatnot time), Midway (F100, and 737 time and what else?), and other airlines that are pretty experienced pilots. There's a bunch of us Comair guys who were mostly captains on the RJ......I 'm flying with new-hires with significantly more experience than I have. That's just the nature of the market. When I got hired at NJA pre 911, they were quite pleased to have CRJ captains walking through the door.
Now, I don't know what the actual requirements are over at Comair anymore, but friends tell me that several thousand hours could get you in the door where pre-911 they were taking people with 1200/200...You would have been in the door there a little more than a year ago.....I doubt, but am not sure, that you would have gotten in the door at NJA a year ago with your time. BTW, you can go to ejapilots.com and see the stated requirements.
Without insulting "corporate" pilots and their many times outstanding flight departments and standards, I think the frac business is PERCEIVED as being a bit different than the local FBO running a Lear or older Citation around. That's a generalization for sure, but NJA is probably a whole lot more like an airline than like an "average" one or two airplane "corporate" flight office. Now please, I know that I'm generalizing here and I'm not trying to in any way disaparage anyone's job or company. But, there is a difference with managing well over 400 aircraft with full-blown dispatch, flight management, owner services, weather departments and dispatched flights versus a smaller flight department. If you have the opportunity to see NJA or FLight Options (I think they have one too) operations center, I think you'd see the difference. NJA's ops center is larger and as state of the art if not more so than Comair's.
We do a lot of diverse flying and probably more of it than the average corporate pilot from what I understand. That may be a factor also.
Looking in retrospect at my experience at Comair and NJA, I would say for me it would have been significantly more of a challenge to start off with NJA versus Comair. The airlines have standard "canned" routes, regular schedules, people handling the fueling, pax and bags, etc.. The nature of the frac business is dynamic and I find myself having to think much further ahead in terms of general decision making in a number of regards at NJA than I did as an RJ captain.
Look, both positions require a lot of training and seasoning but the diversity of the frac business makes it a bit more demanding from my point of view. So, you might be able to go from where you are to a smaller corporate charter/flight department without much difficulty, but with the talent in the pool that exists right now, I think you may find it difficult to get on with a frac or even a regional though you said that you could get an interview and a position with the regional.....
In any event, I wish you the best. It just sucks that you were ready when the bottom dropped out of the hiring market.....
Take care.....
