Hah...yeah, a couple times for a couple of days each time. That's more a symptom of Yoonited bunching all the flying they give us at weird times of the month. I don't know how long you've been here but in years past you would see the red flag go up in April and not go away till September. There would be entire months throughout the year where its red flagged. So a few days here and there doesn't indicate chronic under-staffing to me. If you want my opinion, I think the new schedulers and supervisors in ATL do it to themselves with their staggering level of ineptitude. As someone who is back in the reserve game, I often wonder how much smoother things would operate if they would try to be more efficient rather than deadhead deadhead deadhead all the time.

Short answer? Because management doesn't think that efficiently
IF (a big IF) XJT takes on those aircraft, having guys already on property shortens their spool-up time. If you are just transitioning from one aircraft to the other, training could probably be 2 weeks shorter (no Indoc, no initial CRM). If you pref hire a Colgan guy, he has to go through the whole initial training cycle, regardless how much experience he has in the airplane. So the cost savings are probably not as great as you imagine. The expensive part will be up front in the form of developing and certifying a training and fleet management program from scratch, not training some pilots. And who's to say the Q400 would end up being the junior airplane? If they opened an LAX, SFO or DEN Q400 base, I think you would see it go rather senior. So you're going to have to retrain ERJ guys anyway if a bunch of senior west coast guys bid it.