Originally Posted by The701Express

Those are numbers that have been mentioned on here and bluepilots.com (may it rest in peace). They're not official. No one i know has any hard data on this or is willing to share.

But, we can use Frontier as an example, which has a similar aircraft utilization rate as we do. According to airlinepilotcentral.com they have 1,140 pilots for 65 total airframe, for 17.5 pilots per plane. We staff roughly 14.8 pilots per plane. That's a difference of 2.7 pilots per plane between the two airlines.

Spirit has 16.5 pilots per plane for a difference of 1.7 pilots.

With our fleet size of 227, those differences represent 612 and 385 pilots, respectively.

This is by no means a scientific analysis, but I wanted to demonstrate how those numbers aren't unrealistic for increased staffing requirements based upon a new contract.

Im also not saying Frontier and Spirit are in our peer set, they just happened to fly only our type of aircraft and allowed me to do simple math on the crew van.

We won't know how new work rules could affect staffing requirements until we see a TA. We also don't know how the fleet review or pending international expansion decision will play out and affect staffing needs too. Until then, we've got this place to speculate on the future and discuss the industry.

I was by no means trying to spread fake news, just want to have a friendly discussion.