Professional Pilot Career Journal

May 20, 2005 – Senior F.O.

Well, somehow it finally happened. I actually have seniority at an airline!

Since my last update nearly six months ago, I have enjoyed life as a line-holding pilot. I stopped bidding for reserve duty in February. Although flying only 25 hours per month on reserve was a good thing for advancing my software consulting business, I really started to get tired of the uncertainty of my schedule and being tied to a cell phone. So I started bidding for a real line and have been holding one ever since. I enjoy knowing my flight schedule a month in advance, and the really beauty of it is being able to trade my trips.

Being able to trade trips has allowed me to get my flight pay average from 75 hours to 95 hours per month. I usually start my trips on Friday afternoon and finish up Monday afternoon, so I’m really only gone from home for about 72 hours. I try to bid trips that have a long (30+ hours) overnight in a city so I can have extra time to do my consulting work. All in all, it has become a nice balance of my time although somewhat stressful. Still, I can’t complain.

This year I have had overnights in Oaxaca and Chihuahua, Mexico, New Orleans, and Mexico City (which sucked). I had some overnights small towns in Texas and Louisiana which I have really enjoyed. Flying into small airports is a lot less hassle and the people are nicer and easier to deal with. I have also enjoyed time in Toronto, Montreal and Washington DC. My favorite overnights this year have been in Lexington, Kentucky. We stay in a nice hotel downtown near University of Kentucky and there is always lots to do. Tomorrow I’ll be there again and will drag my laptop over to the UK library and do my work there – it’s nice to get out of the hotel on a 36-hour layover.

I spent my 31^st birthday on a Saturday overnight in Chicago. It was a great time – I got together with old friends and we all had a great time.

So back to the seniority thing. By the end of the summer, on a list of 2750 pilots I will have a seniority number of around 1700. That provides excellent protection from furlough – I don’t think I need to worry about that ever again barring some sort of major catastrophe (knock on wood). It will put me within striking distance of holding a captain slot although I don’t expect to bid for it right away and here’s why. I currently have a schedule of 14-15 days off a month, can trade my trips around at will, and can hold whatever days off I want (although I generally still fly on weekends – it works better for Carey and me that way). Further, it is unlikely we will still be in Cleveland by the end of the year (not that we didn’t enjoy the 25000 inches of snow we got this year, but damn). If I upgrade to captain I’ll be back on reserve again - and commuting to work while being on reserve is no way to live at all – I would never be home. So, I’m going to keep enjoying my cushy schedule and focus my extra time on my wife and my business for the foreseeable future. Although I could probably be in class for captain training by the end of this year, I’ll probably wait at least another year or so until I would have enough seniority as a captain to hold a decent quality of life again. I refuse to ever go back on reserve. I always kind of felt like a second-class citizen anyway.

Anyway, things are good. The airline is stable and I’ve had great crews to fly with. I’ve even been here long enough that most of the captains and flight attendants I fly with I’ve already flown with before. With all the crap that has been going on in the rest of the airline industry (bankruptcies, mergers, layoffs) I’m feeling pretty good about maybe even staying at this airline for the rest of my career. Our west coast and Mexico expansion is looking good and I’m even hoping that one day we will fly for another airline in addition to Continental to get some more growth. But one thing I’ve learned is that I can’t even effectively plan the next year of my life, let alone the next 30. So we’ll have to wait and see.

I have my first real airline vacation next month. The beauty of the airline vacation system is you can take a one-week vacation and turn it into about three weeks off by creatively bidding your schedule. So I’m off from May 31^st to June 17^th. It’s going to be great.

I now have about 3600 hours total flight time and 1400 of that has been in jets. It’s funny how every hour I logged used to matter, but now it really doesn’t. If I did choose to apply to a major airline someday, the only number that would count is number of hours as a jet captain, of which I currently have zero. I haven’t even updated my paper logbook in two years, but I still keep a computerized one. Once I sit in that left seat I’ll probably start updating it again. But for now, my time is better spent drinking beer at baseball games.

Thanks to everyone who has been bugging me to update my career journal. It’s nice to know that people still like to look for updates.