Originally Posted by
Hacker15e
Unfortunately, these numbers are not evidence of some kind of direct cause-and-effect relationship. There are too many factors involved, not the least of which is the actual quals of the individual pilots, and their individual performances at the individual interviews.
>Today< AA has a huge chunk of their classes filled by flows (and this year and last have had much of the remainder of those classes filled by furlough returns). There is no way of knowing if this is going to be true next month or next year. None of us have a big enough tarot card collection to know what the scene is going to be in 2019.
Given the average timeframe at a regional for a guy just joining the ranks today, it is just folly to think that what is true today will also be true in 2-3 years when they've attained enough experience to move on. It is folly to think anyone knows when a 2016 newhire at an AA wholly-owned regional will have their seniority number picked to flow.
The bottom line is, all regionals are the same in terms of career prospects. Pilots from all of them are being hired at all of the career destinations at generally the same rate, and invitations and CJOs are meted out based on individual merits. Feel free to cheerlead your favorite regional to try and recruit newhires there, but potential newbies need to be able to differentiate between what is advertising and what is fact (and understand the real reason why a particular company might really want a newhire to join their ranks instead of a different company).
There are much, much more important factors to consider than this when figuring out where you want to fly at the regional level.
I suppose that's another subquestion, which you and many others seem to be attacking head on: how important are flows? Addmittately, although I do have a preference on legacy/major carrier I'd like to end up with, it's not a choice I'd even necessary want to make now. So perhaps the other question would be: would going to a carrier such as endeavor hurt my chances of being picked up by say AA, or going to PAA hurt my chances of getting picked up at delta, etc. Basically, at the end of the day, I (and I'm sure many others) want to have options. Don't get me wrong, I am definitely interested in flows, but in my eyes they've yet to be proven long term as having value.