[QUOTEThere are not enough active regional pilots to staff all the majors. Not even at current passenger levels. Air travel increases every year and is projected to accelerate. Even if every regional pilot today were to flow to the majors it wouldn't be enough.
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Embarer, Its not like 100% of all major pilots will retire at the same time, so no need to staff all the majors at once. Its gonna take 20+ years for a large majority of the majors' list to retire. Yeah, American might need 1000 pilots sometime around 2025 because they retire 850 pilots that year, but thats at their peak retirement, and 13 years away. Look at the yearly retirement numbers for every airline and for every year. Its a lot of pilots combined over the next 20 years but certainly not an impossible void to fill. My regional has 1000+ fully qualified pilots ready to leave right now. Not in 2025, now. Majors wont need 1000 pilots from 1 regional in the next few years. They might need more but from a variety of sources. It might be impossible for the regionals to fill their void down the line.

Market share will be increasingly difficult to come by, therefore so will authentic and true growth. SWA is the king of this, the other majors arent. Dont expect any major to have significant (100 aircraft in addition to existing fleet) growth anytime soon. They gotta retire aircraft too yah know.

[QUOTE]Their model depends on frequency. They understand that people need/desire to travel at different times of day. The more hours of the day you cover between city pairs the more passengers you carry.
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Kind of. Dont forget EWR, LGA, DCA, JFK, PHL and others are pretty much close to being maxed out in arrival/departure slots. Eventually you will have to run bigger equipment in busy airports because the system is just too stressed out. Frequency will start to be less important, and the number of seats available into these busy airports will start to matter more as demand increases.

So its all frequency huh? You mean an airline can over serve a route and expect to have more passengers? Like, doing MSP-STL 49 times per day instead of 15 times per day will yield more passengers??? WOW, didnt know that. Maybe you should tell Delta. Airlines are in the business of attempting to make money so I doubt more frequency is always their model to make money...