Originally Posted by
kingairfun
Good thoughts by everyone... But what everyone needs to realize is things could change in a month or year.... We could announce another big growth spurt, or the opposite..
To predict a new hire is gonna be an FO for 2 decades is a little shortsighted... Especially for a compnay with only 600 pilots to begin with... Ask any of those furloughed guys if they ever thought they would be a widebody captain just a couple years after returning from furlough.
I've got friends pushing 7 years at Delta, and even longer at SWA and United....all still FO's, the Delta guy is still on the 88 maybe could hold 320 depending on base, looking at maybe a 10 yr upgrade into a 717 in maybe DTW... All about perspective.....
Just keeping it real... the company is far bigger now than it's ever been. To expect it to grow again at the rate it did from 2008-2012 is very optimistic to say the least.... its' like expecting the real estate market to boom again like it did in the early 2000's again now. We've already pulled out of several routes that were part of that aggressive growth plan (Manilla, Taipei, Fukuoka, and scaled back JFK)... we're now doing 2 days trips to PDX and SFO, used to be 3 day... I can go on, but you get the idea.
The junior captain at DAL is basically the junior captain at HAL.. most of our junior CA's were hired around '99 or 2000, as with DAL... the handful of CA's we have hired in 2008 are as a result of 0-hiring at HAL between 2000-2008... DAL on the other hand has been hiring on and off since 2003.
Again, just keeping it real... we get enough Koolaid from our management, lets give the guys considering leaving 10 year careers for HAL the whole picture so they can make an informed choice.