Originally Posted by
de fumo in flammam
And what with the "just get the command time"? To what purpose?
It's what I did in my twenties, and I think it's the worst thing I could have done, spending the rest of my career trying to find airlines which would take me direct as a Captain, most of them bottom of the barrel, start ups, or financially sailing close to the wind, whilst turning down RHS at flag carriers. Unless that's your career plan, 1000 hours narrow body command is worse than useless.
Exactly what I have seen from the industry. Ok you get command 1000PIC most jobs DEC are usually pretty crap. I know a couple of guys went EK 2014/2015 with around 4K hrs 737. Both are now LHS. Ok get command get 1-2k HRS LHS. No guarantee EK will take you LHS in the future and you still have to pass EK LHS assessment which is meant to be ninja style. They usually like people with way more P1 time
anyway so what you get more P1 when you could have just gone to EK earlier anyway.
From what I heard QR is same as well. I don’t know anyone that’s gone to QR LHS with less than 2k P1. Soooooo same as EK why not just go there anyway?
Yes people will say I know FOs who been at EK/QR for like 10 years still waiting for command blah blah but I would say usually there is a reason for this.
Yes it is a hard decision. You could go EK/QR and never make command for multiple reasons.
Can’t predict the future.
I’m not far off 40 either, last few years with all this COVID etc has made me look at life differently. Yeah command would be great at some point but ideally I want to be at an airline that doesn’t have multiple bases they can send you to at a moments notice with the promise of, “we will get you to your base in 6 months” (yeah ok) or is about to go bankrupt in 5 mins.