Originally Posted by mooney

Heres why it leads to cancelled flights. Some of the instructors that went to FDX were pro instructors, some were also line pilots. Many of us line check airmen and regular line pilots are part time instructors in the training dept. We do it on our days off. With as many peeps as we have going through training, we have to immediately replace those full time pro instructors who left and the sim/line check airmen that left or the backlog in training would be atrocious. How do we imediately fill those positions? Pull us part time instructors off our flights to teach in training dept. Then hope a reserve guy will cover it or it will be picked up in open time. With our short staffing nobody can pick up much open time and the reserves are already being used, hence the flight has to cancel. Plus if there's not enough instructors, not as many new hires can be run through training as quickly, so projected future staffing numbers are off to the point we didn't have as many FO's as we need, hence flights cancel for no FO, and since we are short FOs that means no upgrade classes so we also have to cancel for lack of CA in many cases in the regular day to day operations even before we lost that many instructors.