A pilot's life at Flight Options

Flight Options pilots work eight days on, seven days off, a schedule that for the most part is popular with crews. The schedule at Raytheon Travel Air had pilots working six days on and four days off. Company founder Kenn Ricci, a former corporate pilot himself, claims his pilots are the most highly compensated in the frax industry, and in his view “our best pilot is a displaced flight-department pilot. Our pilots are in effect our customer-service representatives, too. We have the lowest pilot turnover rate in the industry, at less than 6 percent.” Everyone on the Flight Options workforce is eligible to take a sabbatical after six years’ service; the choice is two months off with pay, or one month off with double pay.

Flight Options currently has 900 pilots on staff and 5,500 pilot resumes on file, and Ricci notes with pride that Flight Options has never implemented a “pay-for-training” program. “Pay-for-training breeds distrust. It says the company doesn’t trust you to stay long enough to recover its investment in you,” he asserted.

Of the 488 pilots on strength with Raytheon Travel Air at the time of the merger, “10 resigned and six were terminated,” according to Ricci. The integration task facing Flight Options was thorny, as they always are, and Ricci essentially told the pilots to sort it out themselves rather than suffer under some unworkable plan thrust upon them by management. The guidelines were that every pilot’s expectations for seniority were to be met, and there was to be no decline in compensation.