First, I must say that Spirit is nowhere near as bad a company as dasmith suggest.
threegreen has already posted the pay scales, and I will add that it is my opinion that we are around 25% underpayed. However, we renegotiated at an extremely poor time for pilots and still managed to break even. We got a raise of about 20%, and gave up about 20% in work rules. All in all, not good but certainly not third world.
On the quality of life front, we don't have the flying club we had in the late nineties, but we have better schedules than most regionals.
The corporate culture is not good. Our executives all seem to have attended the Frank Lorenzo school of employee relations and try to beat us into submission. With that said, if you do your job at Spirit they pretty much leave you alone, but we have to fight for things that we shouldn't have to; things like getting paid the correct amount. Sometimes the paycheck doesn't match your paysheet, and it is almost never in the pilots favor. (imagine that)
Back to corporate culture, we still have somewhat of a charter mentality at HQ. The owners are quite conservative in their expansion, meaning that they won't expand until they can do so using someone elses money. I wish that we could take advantage of our LCC status and expand, but the owner appears to fear over expansion more than missing out on larger market/profit share.
The present reality is a question mark. We have recently returned all furlougees, and announced that we would hire a class or two in the near future. However, we still don't have an announced deal for new equipment, and the -80's are getting expensive to fuel and maintain. The CP is returning to the line after 3 years and his replacement has not been announced. The current DO was never a Spirit pilot and has no "family ties", we hope that the next CP will come from within.
future prospects depend upon the whim of a multimillionaire owner who isn't trying to build an airline (my opinion, worth absolutely nothing), he is trying to protect his investment.
Now for my two cents, if a pilot had the luxury of multiple job offers from AirTran, ATA, Frontier, JetBlue, Spirit and SWA, any of the others offer fewer unknowns and Spirit would logically be the last choice. However, if Spirit offers a job, I certainly wouldn't suggest turning us down. The pilots here are generally great people.
Contrary to dasmiths comments on training, I have found the Spirit Training staff to be first rate. We use line pilots, not non-flying wannabees for instructors and most of them have been doing the job for decades. We don't offer an excess of sim time during training, but it seems to be adequate for most. The DC9 type was my fourth, and the training Spirit provided for it was no worse than two of the previous three, which included, Simuflight (Lear), CrewPilotTraining (737), and much better than my company provided BAe3100 rating when I worked for a commuter.
Characterizing Spirit training as a one out of five is just plain incorrect.
I have previously posted negative comments about Spirit, which I generally stand behind, but I have to recognize that Spirit is not nearly as bad as it could be.
regards,
enigma