Pros
I give it more of a 2.5 stars (flight department great, upper management not) The maintenance side of the company is awesome. The planes are very well maintained and safe. Things do break on the planes...like anything, but they are fixed and back up and running whether you are on the road or not. The flight crews (most of them) are super cool and great people. Made really good friends outside of work with them. They make being on the road for two weeks a lot more fun. No set uniforms or anything while traveling, and a small phone stipend is nice. They issue the pilots an iPad and foreflight and lightspeed zulu headphones. They reimburse each week for the expenses you build up. Can get a lot of cash back points from all the expenses you make.
Cons
Pilots have no set vacation days. Sure you get your 6 days off (which you could be asked to return earlier on your off days...) but 90% of the time you truly don’t know when your days off are going to arrive. They tell you 15 days on, but I’ve been told to stay a week longer past my 15 because they didn’t have anyone to cover me. That’s not my problem to be short staffed. Yes part of the job is traveling for 2 weeks, but to be asked to stay longer as if 2 weeks away from family and spouse isn’t bad enough. You can’t plan any vacation trips or events because you basically have no Schedule. The schedule gets updated each day, but only showing what’s going to happen the next day. So planning any kind of event, even only a week away is basically impossible. Next is perdiem. The cool flight crews and perdiem made being on the road a lot better! That was a nice benefit of having to travel so much, make some extra cash for the low paying salary of single engine pilots. Unfortunately, the companies management has decided to remove most of the perdiem. You can’t pocket anything now. They pay you for the hotel room, but exact change and they lowered how much food money you get each day. Nice job Management for taking away these guys perks on being gone from family so long... why not lower the pay of the upper management instead of hurting your front line guys. One last thing, it was very frustrating when you could not get ahold of your boss, even during business hours. Doesn’t matter if it was a call, a text, etc. 85% of the time I would not get any sort of response about work related material that I needed answered. Even though the flight crews are micro managed to the max by upper management.
