Originally Posted by
scottm
I'll argue it. Boeing and ALPA claim the majors need to hire an average of 4,200 pilots/year for over a decade. The regionals have 16,000 pilots left, of which the majors consider around 6,000-7,000 desirable pilots. I'm sure the majors can and will adjust those standards down quite a bit, but there are still a lot of regional pilots who will not want to make the jump ever, especially if the regionals start sweetening the pot to stay. That is not enough pilots for the majors. The military is not going to supply significant numbers, and civilian flight academies have few American students.
You are proceeding from the assumption that the majors will only hire pilots from regional airlines and the military. It has been established over and over that there are tens of thousands of other pilots outside these pools that are qualified to work as airline pilots but don't choose to. Even the majors start your first year pay pretty low and many experienced pilots working in other careers or other areas of aviation aren't able to absorb such a pay cut so they don't consider the career. You are buying into the false publicity that has been pushed at great expense by the airlines in order to pressure Congress to roll back the regulations.
Despite claims by ALPA, I've not seen any evidence that there are significant numbers (like even a few thousand) of expats able to come back, or qualified pilots working in other industries and willing to come back.
You personally? Have you done an intense statistical analysis of the numbers and published a study? Just because you haven't witnessed something personally doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are experts who have researched this. There are facts and numbers. If you assume the only people telling the truth are the Regional Airlines then....well I don't know what to say about that. I mean...I don't normally put great faith in ALPA anymore but I'd take them over the RAA. It's just that these days talking to ALPA you may as well be talking to the CEO of a major airline. Congress published an in depth study (as we all know) which you can read for free anytime. Maybe you don't put much faith in what Congress said either but in this case they are standing up to a powerful lobby along side Sully and other victims of the Buffalo crash. I personally wish Congress would stand up against narrow corporate interests in favor of the people more often.
If there were, this would be the time to come back. From a pilot perspective, when mass hiring is obviously going to happen, you get your seniority number whatever it takes. Industry experts don't understand that.
Again, you are assuming that all pilots believe what you believe. Why would an experienced pilot who has a job somewhere else making good money go work for an airline at $20K per year just to get in on that seniority bandwagon? Especially if they are an experienced and high time captain in their forties or later?
Not everybody buys into the seniority system nonsense.
Just because they aren't willing to start their career all over at $20K per year doesn't mean they don't exist.
The majors want a pilot shortage, they need a pilot shortage, and they are getting a pilot shortage. They will make huge money when the regional and low-cost airlines stop suppressing prices, and demand greatly exceeds supply.
This is complete nonsense. Do you really think the majors are in competition with the regionals? With so few majors left they aren't even in competition with each other anymore in most markets.
The majors created the regionals as a B scale for their own routes. The majors even supply most of the large jets to the regionals. The majors hire primarily regional pilots to encourage this B scale flow system to the majors and expect most pilots to spend about ten years average at the regionals before "moving up" from left seat to the right seat. Without the regionals the majors will be forced to fly those routes again like they used to.
The majors will have far less trouble luring pilots that the regionals because despite the low first year pay it usually goes up significantly the second year and I expect to even see that first year go up in the next few years across the board.
If the pilot shortage can be spun into a "crisis", the airline industry is guaranteed to get lots of favorable legislation to permanently lower pilot labor costs.
This is of course their plan which is why pilots need to educate the public and each other on the truth and resist the urge to fall for the lies and publicity spin the airlines are pushing. This is a massive and costly PR and lobbying campaign pushed by the airlines which includes a nationwide press campaign (all those stupid articles about the pilot shortage appearing all over the country), propaganda being pushed on pilots by the airlines, the unions, fellow pilots (unfortunately). They even come into these and other aviation forums and message boards to try to disrupt these conversations.
Programs like DARPA's ALIAS program will get a massive boost to eliminate aircrew labor, although it seems to already have a lot of steam propelling it.
Probably eventually inevitable but I don't see it as an immediate threat to the profession.