Brad Tilden saying he wants the American taxpayers to subsidize pilot training is hilarious.

We're talking about a CEO of a company that has $8b in the bank that refuses to pay it's regional pilots (Horizon) a starting wage over $27k a year. He has outright refused to negotiate for an industry standard pay package to bring in new pilots, and instead pays millions for union busting consultants and hundreds of thousands in "pre employment" bonuses for new Horizon pilots so they can side step the bargaining table.

A simple way to ease our staffing crisis is to offer higher premium pay for trips. We used to have 200% but they said they we were getting paid too much and dropped it to 150%. Now no one picks up premium pay, and both the Horizon CEO and Alaska CEO agree it's better to cancel a full 76 seat flight and spend $8-10k per flight re-accommodating passengers with hotels and tickets than pay the First Officer an extra SIXTY DOLLARS for 4 hours of work. During the month of december we had almost 20-30 cancellations a day for lack of first officers.