The Florida bases have been short staffed for several years. The company is basically to separate companies: East Coast and West Coast. West Coast used to be more important, especially Las Vegas. In the past, they always made sure there were plenty of pilots in Vegas, even at the expense of other bases. Nowadays, every base is short due to the endless TDY.

When the new DO and VP of Flight Ops came in a few years ago, things changed. Pretty much everything got worse. Was it their fault? That's hard to say, not being privy to the discussions that happen in HQ, but some (a lot?) of it is. Part of it also is that an accountant came up with the pilot staffing model. He had no aviation experience, and his model looked great on paper. It doesn't work so well in practice. The staffing model we use assumes everybody shows up every day, and things run perfectly. If there are any delays, sick calls, training, vacation, or other missed work days, the model doesn't account for this. Since we use almost all reserves every day (if there are even any available), this leads to lengthy delays and overnights, which is not accounted for in the model. The last time I ran our staffing numbers, we were crewed at about 2.2-2.3 crews per airplane.

Another part of the problem is the new 117 rules. Depending who you ask in our management, it's either a huge problem, or won't affect us at all. Couple that with a new scheduling system that was implemented in January with virtually no testing and training (no training for anyone, including crew schedulers), and it compounds the problem. There is some debate as to the new program even tracking flight and duty time limits correctly.

The training department was shut down last fall for several weeks, and the main MD-80 sim was grounded in Vegas for months. This lead to a huge back up in training, once they started hiring pilots again. There haven't been upgrades in a long time, but they can't afford to take people off line to upgrade because they can't get the newhires out of training. The company loves to blame the FAA, but 95% of the blame falls on the company. We plan for everything to go perfectly, and then have to contingency plan.

There have been some people leaving, mostly recalls back to AA and USAir, although there have also been people hired by other airlines also. As people get more and more frustrated with what's going on and how they are being treated, more and more people will begin to leave (at least I believe so).

If you get hired here now, plan on being based in Florida for a long time, with an uncommutable schedule. A lot of the junior West Coast people have been TDY'ed for 8-10 months a year, for the last couple years. It may get better, eventually. It all depends if they can get people out of training.