Originally Posted by
gloopy
Its about 3-5 months from interview to line, give or take. It can be longer if the company wants to "pool" but they don't seem to like to do that. If we ended up needing pilots for summer, they could run interviews as late as January or February and still be able to cover it, especially now with new hires having a much more efficient one year freeze.
They don't need but about 2 weeks to spool up the hiring/training pipeline.
In 1985, Delta had not hired any pilots for 4 years. I was called on a Monday to come to an interview on Tues/Weds, hired on Thursday. I was sitting in class on Friday morning. Yeah, 1 week, start to finish, and that's without cell phones or the internet. 6 weeks later I was on the line.
They went from zero to hiring 24 pilots every 2 weeks, while still in contract negotiations, because ALPA finally said NO MORE OVERTIME and guys stopped answering their phones.
Many engineers had 200+ hr. bow waves and were being met at the jetway by a gate agent, on block in, with a 'reroute' trip assignment. So they started dropping the aft airstairs asap on parking, then they would run out the back, across the ramp, to the parking lot. Delta had to start hiring or cancell flights. The 'rumor' we heard in new hire school was, they were only going to hire 200, then merge with North West, then furlough us newbies.
Today we are overstaffed, the complete opposite from 1985. I doubt we'll se any hiring until they are 'short' of pilots, why else would they want extra bodies on the payroll? Anyone see any 'short' categorys out there? We still have 25 a day on reserve, with 6 required in my category, and that's after they have displaced 40 from each seat in the last 3 A/E's.