flythatwing wrote:Any idea how much a PPCed Navajo captain would make there? What kind of work/schedule/hours and career progression ? Layoff season is approaching quickly here and I am Intersted in a position with a little bit of stability and career progression within the same company. Thanks!
They don't fly the Navajo enough to have crews exclusively for it. They like to tell new FOs that if they do well they'll get some PIC time on the Ho, but in reality only the senior captains ever fly it. When I was there, which wasn't that recently, only the 1900 captains were flying it, and even that was only once every couple of weeks. If you don't have a King Air PPC, time on a Navajo probably won't help you out.
They also like to tell new guys that they only need 1600 hours to get upgraded on the King Air 100, but there are so many people in line for that slot that there's not much chance of it happening within two years. They also want a certain amount of experience as FO doing the sched to Edmonton before they'll put you as captain on that run, which means that first you have to get into the right seat of the 100, but since it flies more than the 200s on the medevacs that's also a harder position to get. Alberta Health requirements mandate 100 hours PIC on type to fly medevacs, but they group the 100 and 200; FOs who are upgrading need to get right seat on the 100, then left seat on the 100, and once they've got their hundred hours of PIC they can go left seat on the 200. Despite what they tell you, it's not a quick upgrade, and a lot of people leave because they expected it would happen in half or a third of the time that it was going to.
Having a King Air PPC is pretty much essential, because they don't train unless they absolutely have to. They attract people with experience with good pay (and promises of multi-PIC) but once those new pilots realize its not as rosy as it seemed when they were hired, they take their experience elsewhere. The turnover is subsequently huge. If they hired pilots fresh out of school, or ever bothered to give their rampies flying positions, they could keep those pilots around for a few years at least. Instead, they get people who are close to an upgrade with PPCs, which saves them money on flight training, but then those pilots leave for greener pastures after six months.
Medevacs are pretty standard for Alberta: 10 on/5 off, decent pay for a King Air, and about 300-400 hours per year. There are lots of calls at 4 am, and lots of 12-14 hour days. The aircraft has to be in the air within 30 minutes of getting the call, which is fine for crews in Edmonton and Calgary who are at the airport for their shift, but the Peace River airport is 15 minutes out of town; there's not a chance of going to get groceries or do anything away from home while you're on call. Ten days of sitting in front of the TV waiting for your phone to ring gets to you. They're also perpetually understaffed, and even though they're supposed to have four crews available (two per aircraft so one can fly while the other resets) they were down as low as two at times. They got really lucky there were no calls while those crews were resetting. A lot of the time I went straight back on call once my rest period was up, and going ten days straight without being able to get a haircut or groceries, or have any time to relax without the worry of being called, burned me out; all I did that whole period was work and sleep. I've worked a lot of fourteen-hour days, and I still do sometimes, but when you don't know when or where you're going and getting called at all hours of the day, it gets pretty rough. The schedule is supposed to be set ahead of time and kept pretty steady so you can plan stuff in the future, except for 90% of the time when it changes without notice. Oh, and your five days off are now reduced to three because they need you to start your next ten-on early to cover for a lack of crews, and for the next one you have to take a first aid course for two of your days off. And that thing that's incredibly important that you can't get out of and which you told management about when you were hired? That thing you said is so important that you wouldn't take the job if you couldn't get the time off, and which management guaranteed was safe? Yeah, you need to work for that day now.
FOs have to fuel and wipe the planes down after the flight, which in the winter means freezing while standing over the wing and waiting around for the plane to warm up in the hangar so the cleaners don't freeze, potentially adding an hour to an already long day. The on-call FOs also wash the planes on Saturday mornings, meaning less time to catch up on sleep; it's pretty awful getting up after working a 14-hour day, and only getting eight hours to reset, to show up early on a Saturday and realize that you have to wash six planes by yourself because no one else showed up.
Company culture is pretty standard. There are lots of decent people with a few less-pleasant characters, and one person in particular in management who was a nightmare. RK pretty much ignored me because I was just an FO; after I'd worked there for a couple of months he asked me who the hell I was and what the hell I was doing in his hangar, because he hadn't bothered to meet me before that. SK, on the other hand, was always a pleasure to deal with and helped with anything I needed. When I started, management gave me the impression that the company was like a family and that everyone had barbecues together and hung out together; that wasn't what I found at all, and I never really felt welcome there.
Peace River is a decent town compared to a lot of places further north, but it's a long, long, long way up, and it can be expensive. It's a four-hour drive to Edmonton, and in winter that highway is treacherous, to put it mildly. The only flights south are with NAC, and although employees can fly for nearly free it's all standby and the planes are usually full. If you really need to be somewhere, you have to drop hundreds just to get to Edmonton or Calgary, and if you're going somewhere further afield that's just the start. If you have to write your ATPL exams and need to get to the city, it's not going to be a quick or cheap venture. If you don't like fishing and snowmobiling, there's not much to do in PR, and the restaurants are average at best. Rentals are absurdly expensive, if you can find them at all, but real estate is cheap if you're ready to buy. It's a nice small town for raising a family too.
If you know what you're getting into, and you want to live in a small, cold prairie town, NAC is probably a good choice. If you know you won't be flying much and that it will probably take at least a couple of years to upgrade, but you don't care because you want to settle down, you'll probably enjoy it. It pays fairly well, and if you move there with no desire to move back to Toronto or wherever at the first opportunity you can make a comfortable life for yourself. Just don't plan on getting to the airlines any time soon, or think about rotating from another city, or expect that management will do anything to make your life easier.