Originally Posted by
OnCenterline
To get this back on track, I will wager that Great Lakes and Silver are beginning the inevitable role of the law of unintended consequences to the new post-Colgan rules requiring airline captains to log 1,000 hours of SIC time before upgrading.
It's one of the few sections in that law that actually makes sense, yet the ramifications are huge. If they need to upgrade people, and can't, then they can't staff.
The EAS program will (hopefully) begin a necessary slide to oblivion as a result.
Silver's issue with staffing isn't upgrades, it's new FOs. They hired street captains in 2012, that's been the go-to staffing strategy when upgrades are too quick to promote from within. New FOs come there now, realize that they won't upgrade before the end of the decade, get sick of the horrible treatment by mgmt and scheduling, combined with the low pay, and bail after a few months when they get the call from the better company that didn't call before they had an ATP and a type rating. 3M has become a place to enhance your resume to move on to another regional, not a major. This pattern means they are shelling out major $$$ for training to replace all the attrition, but it's all off the bottom half of the list. Even a 12k signing bonus isn't enough to keep people around. Give it enough time, and they are going to fold. Great Mistakes may beat them to it, but it will be a close race.