airpasty
If you think you'll start on anything near £30k think again, you'll start on Year 1 F/O salary which is about £25k
If you think you'll get an Exeter base any time soon think again, you'll be swimming in the pool for a fair while. Exeter is losing a Dash for the winter, and is not regaining it for the summer, this leaves them at least 33% over crewed.
If you haven't got any command time in your 3,000hrs on the Dash then forget a DEC, infact, forget a DEC anyway. I can't see many, if any TREs leaving as Otto alludes to. Even if we did lose a few can you really see current Dash captains turning down full jet salary and not accepting the job? I can't. Also the training dept. is slightly over crewed. All the ex bacon TRI/Es were made to do the job because they were getting paid the money after the "merger". Anyway, the talk of TRI/Es leaving is irrelevant, if they do leave then you won't be hiring DECs to take on those roles unless they have TRI/E on their licenses.
GusHoneyBun's last paragraph sums it up very nicely.
You get paid salary from day 1, expenses are paid during any (initial) training, can't remember about the FDP during training.
D777
p.s. I'm not sure the 300 has any Q400 "oddities", more like the Q400 has 300 oddities, because good ol' Mr Bombardier decided it was a clever idea to make it a common type
