Originally Posted by
LostWanderer
The chance of any major/legacy airline in the US hiring a temporary Visa pilot is not 0%...its about negative 1000. No chance unless people stop wanting to go to majors which will never happen. They will literally hire citizen cadets directly to the right seat before they hire an E3. Regionals will probably hire you and give you a job right up to when they furlough/go out of business/don't want you anymore, which a lot of guys have found out the hard way the last 3-4 years it seems.
There has not been a single pilot on a E3 Visa who has been furloughed during Covid who hasn't been able to get their same position and seniority back. Nobody has been dropped with the exception of Expressjet which went out of business.
I would certainly class Spirit, Frontier, Atlas and Kalitta as 'Majors' that are hiring on the E3 at the moment. Kalitta and Atlas 747 FOs can hit $200,000 in their second year while being based in Australia. The earning potential at any of these career destinations surpass any Australian carrier bar perhaps QF mainline.
As for your assertion of they'd rather hire cadets than E3s, apart from the ATP 1500hr requirement making that impossible, that's what people were saying about the above operators just over a year ago.