Originally Posted by
atpcliff
This attitude encourages us as pilots to accept lower pay to prevent a "flood" of foreign pilots from "taking our jobs". It is not a good thing for us, and it is also completely wrong.
The largest pool of excess pilots currently available to fly is in the U.S. The largest training capacity for pilots is also the U.S.
Foreign countries, especially in Asia, and then Africa, are desperate to find more pilots. There will not be any African or Asian pilots available to fill slots at US carriers, even if the laws were changed to allow that.
As for foreign carriers taking over US routes? Where will they get the pilots? The only way for foreign carriers to fly between ORD and SFO is for them to hire U.S. pilots, because we have the only excess pilots.
Foreign pilots (with no green card or U.S. passport) or cabotage, are not going to happen, probably ever.
While they don't (and may never) have the pilot capacity to flood high frequency short haul domestic with many thousands of pilots, they'd love to immediately go after the low hanging fruit of pond crossing and trans cons. Even without foreign ownership or cabotage the gulf airlines are gearing up to absolutely bury US airlines in a fare/yield war by dumping unreal amounts of capacity on any and every market they can poach from desperate cash strapped European airlines and then counting on us to look the other way pretending that is somehow part of EU open skies
EK alone is dumping a 380 on MXP-JFK and that's just one of their many, many, many routes they want to do.