Originally Posted by
acecrackshot
So, we hear about pilot shortages...what is the actual number of pilots looking for jobs at a major vs. number of open billets to be filled?
That's not a number you can really pin down because there are too many moving variables.
Airlines have differing manning strategies that change often, and there are differing strategies for as many different airlines are out there. Since the number of pilots working at a particular airline isn't a fixed number, it is impossible to really positively identify how many particular "open billets" there are on any given day.
So, no, there's not really an understood hard number or ratio outside of the numbers the individual airlines occasionally publicly state they intend to hire this year, and the approximate number of applications the airlines occasionally release that they have on file.