Originally Posted by
Qotsaautopilot
IMO opinion there is zero leverage as far as staffing goes for any legacy airline. There are thousands and thousands of ATP rated pilots currently flying jets at 121 operations. Delta and other legacies are top tier when it comes to applicants' wants. I'm not even sure places like spirit would have a hard time finding applicants in the coming years. The only reason there is a shortage at the rj level now is because of compensation and the RAA is doing their best to get the mins lowered again to avoid paying more money. I'd say delta is well above the compensation threshold to attract candidates.
I want every Alpa airline pilot to make more money including delta but staffing I don't believe is giving the pilots any leverage.
Yes, there is a staffing problem. Based on the looming retirements and growth plan, they needed to continue hiring in 2011-2013 but made the decision based on available information they had at the time to to keep staffing low for costs. When they finally began hiring again in 2014, they quickly found themselves in the region of reverse command.
There are plenty of pilots to hire from, and surely if they could keep 150 pilots/month they can dig themselves out of the 3yr hiring deficit in a few years.
However, there is limited capacity in the pipeline to turn pilots into Delta pilots. It seems like the selection/interview pipeline has gotten in front of the wave a little bit. The indoc-thru-sim pipeline is at/over max capacity, though it is being built up and supplemented. And now I think they are seeing some bottlenecks in OE capacity.