ghilis101

congrats boiler, where you going?

BoilerUP

Part 91 light jet co-captain, in the exact place I want to live.

That's all you're gonna get out of me for a while...:-)

ghilis101

nice! QOL baby!

Aviatormar

Boiller congrats man

OnMyWay

I had heard from a few friends who fly for Skywest that the minnimums are coming down...........

cybourg10

RAH has alreadly lowered their mins and SkyWest is having trouble filling classes. ExpressJet has not had any trouble filling up the classes so far this year (we have hired almost 700 pilots) and our mins are 600/100 so I don't think we are going to lower them until we need to.

Airsupport

no, you still will be teaching them how to shoot an ils. dont think just because someone has 1000hrs that they are a good stick and know how to fly a plane, especially a plane whos vref speed is probably 80kts faster than what they have been flying.



where you heading to man?? you joining pinnacles winning team??

nvm, i see you posted. congrats man. have fun.

boilerpilot

I think saab2000 is correct. It hink that this perceived slowdown that some have talked about is only due to the winter season, and that come Feb-July hiring will start again at a fevered pitch. I think that the smaller majors like Spirit etc will start lowering their minimums drastically first, which will cause the legacies and majors to do the same to try and compete with the "up and comings", which will create a huge sucking sound in the regionals and cause even the high and mighty SkyWest and RAH to lower there minimums.

THE GOOD NEWS is that I think that I think this will hep the regional pay level a certain amount. If you have a couple regionals all hiring between 250-500 hours who because of the massive attrition will all have upgrades around 1-2.5 years (SkyWest, AWAC, PNCL, Mesaba, TSA, RAH, ExpressJet, etc etc) why would somebody go to TSA over RAH, for example? I think you'll start seeing more and more incentive programs and (dare I predict) pay increases (?!) to try and lure people in. I think that it's true that the lowering of the minimums has hurt the industry a little bit, but you can only lower them so much, and when literally everybody who has a pilot's license can get a job, there has to be some other differentiating factor. Look at Mesaba, who even with Street Hire Captains is having at least a little trouble. And this is during the slowest hiring time of the year. That being said, I think that almost all of the carriers (Regionals, Majors, Legacies, and Foreign carriers alike) will start increasing their pay packages, because they'll have to! The regionals will increase their pay (and work rules) to keep the watershed attrition from continuing (watershed attrition=not sustainable. The majors will increase their pay to lure people away from the other majors (and LCCs) and foreign carriers. The foreign carriers will increase their pay as they see their massive expansion continue without a ready supply of willing ex-pat pilots to chose from. And I'm not even talking about Part 91 light jet operators yet, who get people an upgrade in pay, QOL, equipment, AND let you live where you want.

The thing is, people talk about how the pay has gone down, and that the pre-9/11 pay was unsustainable. This is true, but the thing is that none of these BK court pay scale negotiations are sustainable, because there simply won't be enough people to fill the positions. I don't think that the levels will increase to pre-9/11, but they'll increase, and they'll increase a lot, because they'll (they being every single carrier) have to to keep people from all the other options out there.

icedawg8

i think what boiler said is true that the pay is going to increase at the regional level. i am a flight instructor now with 900 hours and the company I worked for just raised the pay levels to 40k a year salary and a 5000 dollar signing bonus to stay with them a year. i am reconsidering going to the regionals when i have my 1000/100 because it's about a 50 percent pay cut. Hopefully the regionals will see that the flight instructors are making more money now and dont want to take a huge pay cut and raise their wages.

boilerpilot

Exactly. There are so many facets of aviation that people want to go into, if the regionals and the airlines in general want to continue luring people away from these areas, eventually they will have to offer better compensation than what they are now. Not gonna happen overnight, of course, but it's going to happen, especially when some of the traditionally top tier regionals drop their mins more.