Professional Pilot Career Journal

April 15, 2007 – Ontario

I’m happy to report that I haven’t had any more emergencies since the bird strike in January. In fact, things have been pretty non-eventful as I continue to build turbine PIC flight time and gain experience as captain. There hasn’t really even been any follow-up since the emergency so I suppose that is closed and behind me.

On April 1^st I transferred to Ontario, California to begin flying under the ExpressJet Airlines brand. I did my first flights on our second day of operations – a round trip from Ontario to Boise, Idaho.

So far, everything is working out great with the “new” airline. Our load factors are still very light, but future bookings are already at or above target levels. Our reliability has been excellent so far and we have had no cancelled flights – pretty good for a startup. The on-time performance on my own first nine flights has been 100%. Flying out of Ontario has been very interesting. Since being an airline pilot, I’ve never been based out of a small-to-medium-sized airport like ONT and it’s really nice to not have to wait in line behind 30 other airplanes for takeoff. The departure and arrival procedures are challenging because of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains just to the north of the airport. There are a number of altitude restrictions and places where you have to be careful to not fly through any airspace that is considered a no-no. Still the challenge is a nice change and with all things, I’ll get used to it.

Most of my flying so far has been up and down the west coast. I never thought that I would be able to fly in my old stomping grounds with this airline and it’s a real treat to be able to do so. I’ve flown over Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada for the first time as an airline pilot all in the last two weeks. I was never one of those pilots who would make announcements to the passengers about what we were flying over because there just isn’t much to say about the scenery in Kansas or Alabama. But now I get to bore my passengers all the time by describing our route of flight before takeoff and pointing out things like Lake Tahoe and the Steens Mountains while we’re enroute. It’s nice to not only be flying over beautiful scenery but actually knowing what it is by sight since I had previously flown throughout these areas my entire adult life.

There are some problems mostly with our computerized trip trading and scheduling systems. When in Houston I would get my schedule for the month and proceed to gut it and rebuild it with online trip trading. Right now we don’t have the ability to do that at all in Ontario so what I bid is pretty much what I fly. That’s frustrating because I’ve lost a great deal of control of my schedule. I can’t even see my schedule without calling up our scheduling department and having them read it to me. They tell us that we’ll have the web-based scheduling system up and running in the next month or so but it still won’t be as good or flexible as what we had in Houston. But that’s pretty much the only downside to my Ontario transfer.

I have to say I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my airline career. I’m a middle-seniority captain flying on the west coast based 230 miles from my home. I’m eventually going to have to at least consider leaving ExpressJet in search of a major airline job and I’m not sure at all what I will do at this point. It’s going to take several more months before I have the flight time to apply to a major airline anyway so it’s not a decision I have to make right now, but I’m so happy here that it’s very difficult to think about leaving. So for now I’ll just enjoy this and hope our load factors go up so this operation succeeds so I’ll never have to go back to Houston!

So far I’ve been doing my commute from Las Vegas to Ontario entirely by car. I wasn’t expecting to do this at first but I got so sick of going to the airport, begging for a ride and then being sandwiched into a middle seat that I’ve just found it’s a lot more enjoyable to just get in the car, drive on I-15 and arrive at work 3 ½ hours later. It’s costing me a lot in gas but saving me from going out of my mind – plus I get a few extra hours at home each week. I’ve always enjoyed driving through the desert anyway which I can do while listening to music and wearing shorts instead of my uniform. I don’t think I’ll drive it every time but definitely a majority – at least until I encounter my first 6-hour backup on I-15 due to some drunken clown getting in an accident. I had to get a crashpad for the first month out here which needless to say is something I will never do again. Living with 28 people is just not cool anymore, especially for a married 33-year-old guy like myself. But it was a necessity because of the early unpredictability of my schedule. Next month I’ll just stay in hotels if I need to but that should happen more than once or twice a month, and should go away altogether once this trip trading system is online.

As far as other airline expansion we’ll be flying 10 airplanes for Delta Airlines out of Los Angeles (LAX) starting in June. I haven’t considered transferring to LAX since I like doing the ExpressJet flying and that would be a more difficult commute for me anyway. That completes the transition for the 25% of our airplanes out of the Continental system into other flying. I’m glad we’ve found work for all the aircraft and as a result we’re still hiring 80 pilots a month. This place just keeps getting bigger.

Here are some pictures from the first couple of weeks. Nice to actually have something to photograph!

Once again please, go to xjet.com and buy a ticket for your next flight. XM satellite radio, non-stop flights, and the food is free and very good. Oh, and dollar beers for those of you not actually flying the airplane!