New hires already have a 2 year B scale and will soon have at least a 1 year freeze. That will significantly lower the cost of new hires going forward. There is also quite a bit of difference between years 1 and 12. As hundreds of 12's leave the pattern and are replaced with 1's that will go a long way to lowering average pilot costs.

Yes, all those hires will eventually be 12's one day, but as they mature up the scale there will be a steady, forever stream of 12's leaving and 1's coming in on the bottom to start over.

And that's if we stagnate forever. Imagine if we actually grew. You know, like all those other carriers that DL is providing the "Capacity Dicipline" for. If we could push the AF/KLM balance back to 50% (and actually keep it there, as well as including ALL their cargo into the mix as it should be) and reduce the Alaska code share abuse by even just 10 or 20% we could actually be in growth mode, which further lowers costs by creating and leveraging the juniority of costs across the entire operation at the same time revenue volume and opportunities are increasing.

And if we can stop the outsourcing of 255 DC-9-10 replacement jets we could have thousands of new hire pilots over the rest of this decade. It would suck to have to do that on a B scale of any sort (and I don't think that is warranted at all) but worst case a B scale and a longer airframe freeze for those new hires would mitigate a lot of those costs not to mention eliminating multipile layers of redundant management and guaranteed profits paid to other companies, some of which compete directly with us and are growing (and enjoying lower unit costs because of it) while we stagnate (and eat higher costs).