Originally Posted by
NineGturn
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably eventually inevitable but I don't see it as an immediate threat to the profession.
I have actually read GAO-14-232. It uses data from 2012 and earlier, and is filled with questionable assumptions. The number one bad assumption is that pilot supply has ever had any connection to pilot demand, which it has not. Until around 2000, pilot supply was based on what the U.S. military was doing with pilots, as the vast majority of airline pilot supply came from the military, especially the Air Force. Supply and demand curves at the Air Force have historically been opposite each other, they have a terrible record of shortages and gluts. Civilian pilot supply has never followed any demand cycles. The long training time and the long time between demand cycles made that impossible. So looking at falling wages and concluding there is too much supply, is incorrect.
I don't see in GAO-14-232 where there are tens of thousands of American pilots overseas, waiting to come back to fly in the U.S.. I do see where it mentions around 8,000 pilots with FAA ATP certificates, and around 16,000 pilots with FAA commercial tickets, have a residence overseas. Did you know that Embry-Riddle and Flight Safety International train far more foreign pilots than American pilots? And those foreign pilots get FAA certificates? Those foreign pilots go fly for the foreign airlines that sponsored them, and have addresses overseas. They aren't waiting for pilot jobs in the U.S., so that premise is false. There may be American pilots overseas who would come back, I've talked to some, but I've seen nothing to indicate many thousands of them.
Several sources in this report look at how many students are moving through U.S. flight schools, without regard to how many are actually U.S. citizens. Some of the large flight academies in the U.S. have been sold to foreign airlines, who operate them solely to train their own pilots. Their students have U.S. addresses, so they are U.S. residents, and they get FAA certificates, but they are not going to end up in U.S. airline cockpits. Most of the FAA certificates being given out today are going to foreign students, not Americans.
One of the big sources cited in this study is Audries Aircraft Analysis. When that study came out I contacted the author with questions about citizenship, on the supply end, and about non-airline demand for pilots, which is actually huge and ignored by every study out there. This is a very tough subject to get real numbers for, and Brant did a better job than most, but still left out some huge numbers.
Nobody has any data on Americans with ATPs waiting to return to the profession. It is possible, but seems unlikely, and there are no numbers.
For the past 15+ years, the major airlines and the financial press have been clearly stating that the low-cost carriers are responsible for keeping ticket prices low. If that isn't clear to you, or you somehow missed it all, I can't come up with anything more convincing. Even today there are new airlines trying to start up and undercut the others. There seems to be no limit to people rushing in to lose money in an attempt to start a cheaper airline, while existing LCCs state they can't find pilots. A shortage of some critical resource, that won't significantly go up in price at the majors, and is available to the majors when it isn't available to the LCCs, is a miracle. Or excellent strategy and planning.
DARPA. ALIAS. Read about it. I've worked in industrial automation for 30 years, and I'm stunned at the automation that is coming out of research labs and into production. The technology exists, DARPA is just looking at how to integrate it into EXISTING cockpits and culture. They aren't talking ten years from now. It will happen slowly, and I think I'll be safe as a captain at a major. But a large drop in demand for pilots will effect every pilot in the industry, and most of us will still be here. Pilots who are new today, will be in trouble. This industry loves to shed pilots.