Well, a number of things have
changed since my last report. Most
importantly, I got married in September!
Carey and I are very happy.
I had a great summer flying
for XJET. Most enjoyable was a number of trips I made to
Every time I went to
Best of all, I had really
great crews to fly with over the summer.
When you are doing 4-day trips all month, you get more time to get to
know the people you are flying with and that makes a
big difference.
Although I’m senior enough
to hold a line, I’ve been bidding reserve for the last three months. I know I did nothing but complain about being
on reserve before, but I’ve been doing a lot of contract software work for my
“pre-airline-pilot-days” company and being on reserve gives me a lot more time
to do that work, which pays a lot better.
Other advantages of being on reserve is that I’m not on call until 1130
each day, and being that I’m a senior reserve guy I’m able to get mostly
whichever days off I want, such as the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. The beauty of it is that whenever I want to I
can go back to holding a line, which I will do when I get sick of being on
reserve or stop getting contract work, whichever comes first. But for now, the money provided by the
contract work takes priority. And no
matter how little I fly, the airline still pays me my 75-hour monthly guarantee,
so it’s like getting paid to have two jobs when I’m really only doing the total
equivalent of one full-time job.
However, even though I’ve
been doing this career (off and on) for well over three years, I still feel
that I haven’t really experienced the life of an airline pilot. That is, the typical life of doing 4 4-day
trips a month with the same crews and relaxing on my days off and at my
overnights. I’ve either been on reserve,
or have had contract work to do during my off time which is not typical for
someone in my career. If and when the
contract work dries up, I think I’ll finally experience this life for real, but
for now, I’m still not sure what it is really like to be an airline pilot.
The general news with the
airline is great. I have fully 538
pilots below me on our seniority list.
That gets me out of the bottom 20% and maybe 2 years from being a
captain. More and more pilots continue
to leave the company to go back to Continental Airlines where they were
furloughed from in 2001 (you know, the wonderful flowback
agreement that caused me to lose my job in the first place). We have reached a tentative agreement on our
pilot contract that we have been negotiating for two years and it looks like it
will pass our general balloting. That contract
will make us the best-compensated pilots flying 50-seat jets in the industry as
well as improve quality of life with respect to scheduling. Also, we are starting to fly routes out of
My most enjoyable experience
this last month went like this. My
parents came up to visit us a couple of weeks ago. Prior to that, I was on the phone with my
father while I was checking my reserve schedule on the internet, and realized
that on the day they were flying up to see us, I was doing a flight from Austin
to Cleveland. Turns out it was going to
be their flight! I figured the odds of
that were about 1000 to 1. It was the
coolest thing ever having my parents on my airplane. I even made a decent landing for their
benefit.
I’m looking forward to the
holidays. I’m also looking forward to my
first airline-paid vacation next year – I actually get two weeks! We’re planning on taking them in May and
September.