Luv2Rotate

Ask pilots at Horizon, Republic, Express, Skywest ect... They're all looking at upward of 7-10yrs for that fourth bar.

PCLCREW

Ask pinnacle FOs. Its 5+ years right now and could be be a lot longer. Just to add to the growing list of "who knows how long the upgrade is gonna be".
If your a CFI and still in college switch to business. I'm sitting in a hotel bar in DTW listing to how hard it is to get by on a 100K a year.

Omnivorous

I won't go into any more specifics than this for the sake of anonymity but I'm not with Lewis University.

BelowMins

I'm at Express. Our most junior Captain was hired in June 2006 making upgrade 5 years and 7 months. Not 7-10 as you claim. Skywest also has a 5.5 year upgrade right now. Republic also 5.5 year junior captain.


Horizon is over 11 years for upgrade. So you're one for four.

SlowATRDriver

My sentiments exactly, I don't know where he gets is information from

Luv2Rotate

My bad 1/4. That's great Vegas odds though

Colnago

bic time.......nuff said

fjetter

Apparently not enough said...believe you meant "PIC Time"

wrxpilot

At SkyWest it's 5 years to upgrade on the Brasilia, and we are starting to see some attrition. About 20 people left in January alone. Since I was hired 10 months ago, I've moved up about 100 spots, and there are about 400 people below me.

I'm not one to preach about a looming pilot shortage (there won't be one), but the current time to upgrade is due to a double whammy of Age 65 and the recession. Clearly the time to upgrade is going to go down, it's just a matter of how much. Best case (IMO), it will eventually be 2-3 years to upgrade here. Sure it could be longer, but there is currently no data to support that viewpoint.

As far as doing something before the regionals, I don't understand that argument if your goal is to be at the majors. If you head off to AMF for 3 years and then over to SkyWest or somewhere else for another 3 years, I just don't see you being ahead of somebody that just went to SkyWest in the first place. This is coming from a guy that went and did a bunch of other crap before coming to SkyWest... Even though that allowed me to do some pretty interesting stuff and get a jet type, I'm still sitting right seat in a Brasilia instead of being in the left seat.

Now if your goal is to simply explore several different career paths within aviation in order to decide what you really want to do (or to simply have more options with charter/corporate), then by all means head over the AMF and get some 135 experience. That is essentially what I did, so at least the airline stink might wash off if I try to jump back to the charter/corporate world.

As far as which method is the best, nobody here knows that unless they have access to a time machine.

wrxpilot

If you are going to switch majors, for eff sake don't make it a business major. That is, unless you aspire to work retail or become a starbucks barista. As to where some of you guys come up with this notion that business majors are all making serious bank and low unemployment, I'll never understand.