The beauty is that soon NONE of them will be able to hire sufficient pilots as there is simply an inadequate number of them in an increasingly shrinking pipeline. Considering major airline retirements over the next decade, this situation will eventually touch the legacy airlines, but by then I cannot see how many RJ's will even still be in operation. I say "beauty" in that it is the very people who orchestrated this situation will be the ones that suffer. They have been in deep, deep denial and evidence of that today is that are still doing nothing but kicking the can further down the road.

This profession has gone from a once desirable career to becoming just another job that is far too expensive and a pain in the arse to tolerate. As such, it's being avoided. The patient has cancer, it has been in an increasingly symptomatic situation and it has denied its symptoms, avoided treatment and procrastinated too long and now is entering stage IV where a cure can only be achieved by aggressive and drastic action that will be very unpleasant to the patient.

I wonder if it is too late already.

In the interim, it appears each of the legacies are taking a different approach. Actually, Delta and UAL are on similar pages and AA has gone in the opposite direction. Over the next months and years one of those two paths will prove to be more successful then the other and that will impact the pilots at the regionals tied to that particular path. I think what looks like one thing now, will morph into something different in the future and so present regional pilots should try to consider who has a better track record of success in the past and factor that in to where you want to position yourself in relation to a particular path.