Cessnadriver

I was recently turned down at a SkyWest interview and was looking for other possibilities for a Milwaukee guy. Right now, I may go someplace to gain some 121 experience to make me more marketable to Skywest in 6 months, but I may decide to stick around if I really like it. Skyway was my first thought since it is local, but I hear that Skywest has some reservations about taking employees away from Midwest.

I was also looking at Pinnacle or Mesaba since their bases are an easy commute from MKE. What would you do in my position? I am also considering Republic. How easy would it be to get an ORD base for a new guy. Right now, I’m at around 1800 and 200 hours with most of my experience in flight instructing.

ctd57

I don't know about Mesaba, but Pinnacle's pilot group is a great bunch of people, at least in DTW, not really sure about the other bases. I have only flown with a handful of people from Minny and Memphis. I haven't had any problems with anyone that I have flown with. I have only been here 6 months, but that is a pretty good track record so far. We are in contract negotiations, who knows when we get a new one, I haven't really heard any updates. FO pay sucks, but the upgrade is a quick one. So it pays off in the long run. Upgrade time is basically how long it takes you to get to company mins. With your kind of time you could probably upgrade in about 18 months. Who knows, maybe less. We need captains bad and the mins were just lowered to try and combat that problem. Management sucks, but what regional airline doesn't have a problem with that.

ShyGuy

Mesa.

Radar

Skyway's 1900 upgrade would be almost immediate. You'll learn to fly as there is no autopilot, but the upgrade is a lot of responsibility with such little airline experience. Understand that if you don't read a NOTAM correctly out of a twelve page WX packet during a ten minute turn and launch to a closed airport you might take a serious set back in your career trying to fast track yourself to 1000 hours PIC. The Dornier 328JET is fun to fly. The pay is bad, close to if not the industry's worst. However, probably quite livable if you are in MKE and can live mostly free. There is little or no time on reserve right now for new hires. Now the bad... there is a reasonably good chance (read certain) that you will be furloughed when the Beech leaves. The latest word is it leaves in January. That means the upgrade is gone too, you don't have a 1000 hours and you get recalled to sit reserve as a 328 FO. Staffing should then come down to about 150 pilots, including both Capt. and FO positions to staff the 12 Dorniers. That estimate is being generous I think. If you want to end up at Skywest, do not go to Skyway as there is undoubtedly some badness going on in the way of an arrangement to not hire Skyway pilots at Skywest due to the new Skywest contract. (Good pilots with excellent experience are not getting hired even though Skywest can't staff in MKE.) What else? The company is imploding, schedules are terrible, people are leaving in droves, there is a merger with Airtran that is most certainly going to happen which could leave you in the street or flying a 717, if no merger happens perhaps Skywest does all the Skyway flying, the DO was retired (fired) because of the staffing issues, fleet manager and flight standards Asst. Chiefs left suddenly for Jet Blue, most of the training department has left for Midwest or Jetblue so expect a new instructor to get you through training, Midwest has put a hiring freeze on the pilot group to prevent attrition. Moral is depressingly low. Skyway is a gamble to say the least. Perhaps you should look up "Skywayed" in the urban dictionary to get a true feel for the company. Use it in the sentence, "You might get Skywayed along with the rest of a good pilot group."

Mesaba appears to have the full support of NW. Saab upgrades seem to be running 6mo - 18 mo depending upon how soon you get on. You can still make it in on the first half of the expansion which I think is probably wise if you want to have a decent quality of life and forward career movement in a timely manner. The company is a class act; I guess they finally did replace the carpet over at the Skyway HQ. But, Mesaba's HQ is truly a state of the art operation. Better attitude, better managed, some 18 CRJ200s coming from Pinnacle, 36 CRJ900s. Lots of growth and a quality training department. Minneapolis tends to be a senior base. However, DTW and Memphis are relatively easy commutes from MKE as well.

Pinnacle. Really? There are some really good people working there, but that is the case every where. No offense, but really?

rickair7777

While I haven't heard anything specific, it is VERY likely that Skywest has either a formal or informal agreement not to poach pilots from a Midwest affiliate. So if you want to keep your Skywest options open, you might want to avoid Skyway.

Flyboydan

Very well said......thought you the pilots are some of the best to work with. SkyWest guys have their high heads cause they are newer guys flying jets..ooo...their MKE based FAs are a joke too.

Radar

I guess I forgot about Skywest. Not that I mind pilots taking other pilots' flying. If you want to go to Skywest go right ahead. There are just some things that a person will never be able to convince others of no matter what. Blind sheep...

On another note, what is up with those FAs? Just fricking weird, the whole lot of them.

Flyboydan

The SkyWest FAs at MKE are just FAKE! They walk around with this attitude that you know can't possibly be true and they are expecting us to bend over backwards for them...mm..yeah no. They especially don't like it when us, the rampers tell them to told the passengers on board until we're ready. This past week we had a deadheading FA go off on us because we told her that her crew bags (ala express bag) wasn't in the bin.*

*She was standing right next to it as her bag was on the bottm shelf of the express bag cart.....and she wasn't blonde either.


Last tuesday there was a new FA, this time a guy, and he basically took the paperwork from me, pax list and load slip, ok..I figured he was going to give the pilots the load slip. I was wrong, I came up into the cockpit 10mins later to see if the crew was done with the paperwork, the dang FA kept the load slip! Then when I confronted him about it...."What's a load slip??" At least our FAs know what a load slip is.

ctd57

I hope that you are kidding

bender

I talked with a friend who is a ramper/gate agent in MKE, and he told me that even with the initial problems with their block times SkyWest's performance is still leaps and bounds above Skyway. I'd reapply with SKW in 6 months.