Originally Posted by
QuagmireGiggity
False. There are far too many pilots at the regionals. Even the Devil himself Roger Cohen says the regionals currently have 300 too many 50 seaters which is 2-3000ish pilots too many after the transition to larger RJs.
Don't fall in to this false sense of security because Eagle is offering sign on bonuses. These are temporary band aids to float them a little while until they figure out what they are going to do. If there was a true shortage pay would be going up not down.
They can shut Eagle down far faster than most believe. They have plenty of trump cards and one is to put mainline planes to fill gaps. Either way it will shrink way down and if the intention is to only have 60 airplanes at Eagle they can put 10-20 at Mesa, a few at Wisky, Skywest and Eagle is done.
Explain to me how giving 60 airplanes to other regionals is going to cover 230 airplanes worth of flying over night?
You are part of what wrong with this industry, you need someone to tell you things. Go read the company financials and mainlines' SCOPE to understand that there will be over 200 RJs parked over the next 2 years. But I fail to see where there would be a surplus of pilots at the regional level. Last I checked the RJs aren't being replaced on a 1-1 basis but the pilots leaving outpace the number of pilots incoming by a large margin. RAH who has been hiring the most has not been able to grow its seniority list by much and has already said they will sacrifice 50 seaters for the Ejets in 2014 if they are unable to grow their list by 500 pilots. Do you think there is a coincidence of hiring at the legacy level with rip lanes parking at the regional level? For example at Eagle they are offering unrestricted flow after September, well September happens to be when the E140 start being parked. But they are likely to park them sooner but have to restrict the flow as RAH is unable to fully staff all the flying they do for AA.
Eagle can't be shut down over night due to market forces as well as contract language that protects furloughs. I do understand that they can violate those contract provision but they can do the same with the new commitments they are offering. It would take them years to shut the operation down. And if they do it mainly by shifting the flying to mainline then that's exactly what we want but the next 800 eagle guys hired at AA aren't part of just a contract provision but a court order and that's not as easy to violate.