Originally Posted by
Slats
DAL HR at WAI, said they don't anticipate hiring until mid-late 2014. That's a looong time to be in a pool. When all the legacies start hiring in 2014, you'll see movement from across the regional board...
Your claim is not consistent with the posts in the "WAI Intel" thread, most posts in there said the recruiters anticipated hiring late this year with classes early next year. I know it's all he-said-she-said at this point, and DAL is going to hire when DAL is going to hire, but I just figured I'd point it out.
What I find interesting is DAL will have 5,000 mandatory retirements in the next 10 years, and if they continue with their fleet plan (adding mainline airframes while reducing regional airframes to maintain flat system-wide capacity), they will need to hire more pilots than what is required for retirements. So let's say 5,000 (shrinking system-wide capacity / no mainline growth) - 7,000 (conservative system-wide growth / mainline growth) pilots hired in the next 10 years. If DAL started hiring today, they would need to hire 500 - 700 pilots / year. So, I guess even the "bad" news that we would have to wait until the end of 2014 to see mainline DAL hire is also good news...the longer DAL waits to hire, the more pilots they will have to hire each year to meet staffing requirements. New hires will spend less time on reserve / possibly stuck in a base they do not want