Originally Posted by
schmohawk
Say delta takes all the regional flying in house tomorrow. You'd probably still fly the regional planes as long as you would have been employed at a regional, maybe 5-10 years if you're a civilian.
If there were no regionals, then military and civilian pilots would not be differentiated at mainline. Everyone starts at the bottom of the seniority list and moves up by attrition above at the same rate.
The difference now is military can skip the regional proving grounds and can go direct mainline (at least I think they can - maybe I'm wrong)