Originally Posted by gloopy

Yeah it seems like we're really focused on saving pennies for a few more seconds than we are actually getting ahead of the issue. Heard we cx'd dozens of flights over Xmas from a lack of pilots. We're below the supposedly magical 10B debt number where the financinals are supposed to morph into perpetual awesomeness yet the hiring is slowly beginning to barely trickle in with no real signs of accelerating other than rumors and unconfirmed inuendo. Everyone thinks Wall Street is all coiled up ready to freak out and tank the stock if word gets out that a company starts hiring to replace a looming, highly predictable and unavoidable mass exodus. Then we paint ourselves into a corner calling furlough bypass pilots "new hires" with all the press release fanfare when they could have easilly slipped under the radar completely giving us a 150 or so pilot buffer before we "hired" a single pilot.

Are we hiring any mechanics? FA's? Rampers? Managers? Where is the institutional investor freak out from that? Its absolutely ridiculous to think anyone involved in the stock will wig out because of a few hundred additional pilots when they are needed to properly run the operation. To any extent anyone in the investment world anywhere cares about capacity, they only care about the actual size of the airline network. Relative to that, 300 or 600 isn't going to make a blip on our stock price. If the mainline is indeed growing, it can be painted as a positive. 2 pilots on a 150 seater doing the work of 6 pilots on three 50 seaters is what facilitates lower CASM and operating expenses all around anyway.