I’m sitting here in my hotel room contemplating that I have to start getting ready for work in about an hour and fifteen minutes from now. I’m listening to a mashup from DJ Schmolli called ‘Sabotaging The Kooks’ which features the Beastie Boys, as well as the new free song from The Offspring called Hammerhead. You can get it here: Offspring.Com

Speaking of The Offspring, I’ve been listening to them for 15 years, since their early years in Orange County California where I’m originally from myself. I can vividly remember driving through LA traffic every night on the way to college while listening to ‘Bad Habit’ - A song about, well, bad traffic… among other things! Most of the band members are around my age and interestingly enough I’ve got a very good friend who lives next door to one of them and another good friend who is working for one of them. With all this I still haven’t met any members of The Offspring, suffice to say how cool that would be. Also, you may have caught Joe d’Eon’s excellent interview with Dexter Holland several months back. Dexter is an avid pilot, I’ve seen his airplane a few times, but for the sake of his privacy, I’ll keep it’s type and location to myself.

On another note, you may have noticed that I added the category “About the Job” to this site. I’ll be posting everything I write that has anything to do with being an Airline Pilot in that category now.

So with that, I wanted to give you a little insight into the subject of seniority, something I said I’d touch on in a future post. The easiest way to explain the term ’seniority’ to anyone who’s unfamiliar with it would simply be to describe a totem-pole. Now imagine that there’s a bunch of nicks in that totem-pole, from top to bottom, and every nick is one hire date of one pilot at an airline, starting from the top down. The pilot at the top was the first pilot hired and has first choice in everything from domicile to aircraft to even the tiniest little details having to do with his/her schedule. In other words, seniority is everything to an Airline Pilot.

Each airline has it’s own seniority list - it’s not something you can take with you when you leave. Hence all of the problems with integrating seniority lists when airlines merge. Even more important, seniority protects you when airlines have trouble and furlough pilots. The lower you are on the totem-pole, the greater the chances are of getting laid off when times are tough. So it’s important to get hired at what you think will be your final airline at as early of an age as possible.

Although no one has the exact answer, I think most pilots would agree that getting hired at a major in your early thirties should be good enough; although I know plenty of pilots who were hired at the majors in their mid-twenties, one of which is set to retire at his carrier as the number one pilot - And he will have been since the age of 54. Another pilot I know was hired by a major carrier in the 1960’s at the age of 20. Yes, 20. He retired #2 but essentially was the number one pilot since the actual number one had been out on a medical for some time. That’s pretty impressive when you consider that the major airlines employ literally thousands of pilots!

Well folks for lack of time I’m going to have to cut this post short - I need to get ready for work. Look forward to more posts ‘About the Job’ in the coming days/weeks as I try to fill this category up!

As always, fly safe!

~Capt’n Chris

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