FWIW, I've been at Expressjet since November, and you really shouldn't trust much you hear from someone who was just at the training center, or just spoke to a recruiter, or whose best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.

There are rumors swirling rampant about everything from tons more flying and more planes to a halt in hiring. I've learned to just take it one month at a time, wait for the official briefings from the company, and take it as it comes.

I know for a fact today that the vacancy bid that just came out only has one upgrade class. Immediately, people are taking this to mean a slowdown in hiring/upgrades is now a trend, but one data point does not a trend make. It could be because training facilities/instructors are limited and they need FO's more than captains. Yes, I'd like to see more upgrades because I've rolled the dice on a 3-year upgrade (I can hope). But we'll see what happens later in the year.

I also have official attrition numbers, and we are losing (on the xjet side), about 12-16 people per month on average. Definitely not enough to account for the 32-48 they've been hiring new each month. That being said, we are starting to see some more movement of captains towards other larger (aircraft size-wise) carriers.

I also know they just hired quite a few new instructors. Doesn't make sense to do that and then cut hiring way back all the sudden. But again, you can't extrapolate a long term trend from one piece of data.

So are we gearing up for something? Work rules? Anticipating new flying/contracts? Anticipating attrition increasing end of year? Or were we just understaffed and hiring will slow in a few months? No one really knows for sure. Like I said, one month at a time.