Originally Posted by
Squallrider
Id be shocked beyond years if we went down to 2-3 years. I'm at 4 and I'm 400 away, with no net gain/loss of flying (unlikely since were parking about 35 Bros). Skywest is filled with very senior people that won't lewve even if they are 20-25 years from retirement. Even a great influx of new flying such as 50 planes would only move up the upgrade a year. (250 pilots, current attrition is 20-25 captains a month). There's a big bubble that will lower it about 1.5 years but I doubt it'll go below 5 anytime soon, hope I'm proven wrong.
Just running some quick numbers, the most junior captain is about 2000 on the seniority list, new hires are coming in around the 3400 mark. We're currently upgrading at about 25 crj upgrades, as well as about 25 175 captains a month. Now is that sustainable with just attrition once we stop getting new aircraft? Maybe not, but with increased attrition just from the majors, I feel like 30 upgrades per month would be a reasonable figure. So 1400/30=about 47 months or about 4 years for a new hire now to be able to upgrade.
Take that with a grain of salt, lots of things not factored into that. I'm not super concerned with the effect that the brasilia going away will have, as they said a lot of the routes will be replaced with 50 seaters, and they were definitely pulling several of those out of the desert just 6 months ago. But lots can change, attrition could be higher or lower, we could gain or lose more flying, it's a bit of a crapshoot. I may be on the optimistic side, but to me a 4 year upgrade sounds reasonable for new hires at the moment.