That wasn't what he said. He said:

Spirit has 50 airplanes and 789 pilots (our internal #'s). That's 15.78 pilots per aircraft.

Virgin America has 53 airplanes and 578 pilots (according to APC). That's 10.9 pilots per aircraft.

VA has 44% more pilots per aircraft than Spirit, and thus needs 200 less pilots than Spirit to staff a 6% larger fleet. The #'s don't lie.

Since you brought it up, though, Spirit also has a more senior pilot group, with pilots at the top end of the wage scale, 15+ years. Virgin America doesn't have any pilots near the top of their wage scale. So, yeah, VA pilots probably average 20% less than Spirit pilots to do the same job, and that's without accounting for our higher pilot/aircraft ratio (those extra 200 pilots cost $). Believe me, Spirit management would love to change that, and will bring this up during our upcoming negotiations, so we're all for VA's pilots costing their company more, and so is our management.

I'm not here to put down VA - its a great product, and I ride VA over Spirit whenever I can as a jumpseater.

I don't see why this has to be viewed as adversarial, Spirit vs. Virgin America, which is better? Virgin America is a high risk company right now, relative to others (lower market presence, questionable profitability, etc.) - but with risk comes reward. Spirit is a higher risk company than the legacy carriers too (our business model is profitable, but will passengers choose to pay more for better amenities, long term, and can we continue to grow now that the 'low hanging fruit' has been picked?). Less risk than VA, less potential for reward. Junior Captain here is Jan 2008 currently, 2 years longer than VA, but still much faster than Southwest, UA, DL, AA, or Fed Ex/UPS.

Since this is a Spirit thread, I'll bring it back to a Spirit issue: Good to see 620 only took 2 days to get on-line after arrival here in the US. We need more airplanes to cover the current schedule, IMO.