Here's some more napkin math to chew on. We have 1194 pilots on the seniority list. Let's say 50 or so are on leaves of absence, not flying. That puts us at roughly 1150 flying pilots. We have 115 planes (incl the 200). That's roughly 1150 pilots we need. We are staffed for that. That ratio (10:1) is what Foley is on record as saying his goal is to staff Mesa adequately (we know long term that won't happen). Factor in roughly 40-50 in training at any given month (initial and upgrade), not flying revenue flights, and we are under 10:1. We can still make that work for a little while.

However, I think we hired 5-10 in Nov and don't know how we will do in Dec/Jan with recruiting/retention, but we aren't getting a whole lot in class. We have lost over 20 a month the last few months consistently, maybe more. At this rate we won't be able to staff the current planes we have in 6 months, much less be able to staff the projected growth.