Originally Posted by Flying Elvis

With 100 new hires and 50 swaps/upgrades a month, conservatively that's about 7,500 hours of OE a month. The TA allowed the company to hold back 75% of those from bidding from the FOs, and though the staffing model wouldn't have changed, this would allow a slowdown in hiring to achieve that staffing model and still fill lines (we're way behind the staffing model already). With a bit of LCA re-allocation to take full advantage of the 75% holdback, that's 5,625 fewer hours to cover, which means 85 fewer pilots (assuming 20% reserves).

TA added one hour to the Average Line Value (number of hours a lineholder flew in a month). Figuring 8000 lineholders, that's 80,000 hours more flown, requiring roughly 120 fewer pilots.

Other efficiencies were expected from sick leave and scope concessions. I don't know what those were, but you can bet there was a good estimate and that they were significant, or DAL wouldn't have negotiated them. For Ha-Has, let's say that was worth only 10 pilots. I think it was worth a lot more.

Other brilliance in there as well. Big raise up front, but nothing towards retirement (until a whopping 1% increase in 401k in 2017). Incentive for older pilots to hang till 65. Fewer retirements = fewer new hires needed. There are about 1900 pilots currently 59-64 years old. Let's say just over 10% of them (200) are considering retiring early this year. Do ya think an immediate 8% raise, but then essentially flatline after that, might convince them to hang for another year or two, but not too long? If it works for 20% of them, that's another 40 pilots we don't need to hire this year.

Oh, and fewer pilots means even more efficiencies, because that means I can send some of my SLIs back to the line (which many SLIs had been told to expect).

Added all together, my admittedly-soggy spitball says we would have needed to hire about 250 fewer pilots in the immediate future. I think the company was hoping for even better results.