Simple economics, if you offer cheap tickets and have a large amount of pilots and planes, you can't pay very much. If you have less pilots and planes, you can charge more and make it more of a scare resource, then you can pay the pilots more. There are way too many pilots, planes, and airlines these days. It's getting better, but it has a ways to go. There's no magical "economic recovery" that is going to fix the regional problem and how out of hand it is. The only real way for things to get better is for a bunch of airlines to go out of business. Something has got to give. It won't be better for the pilots that get furloughed or fired, but the current industry is at the expense of the former classic "airline pilot".