Originally Posted by chrisreedrules

Some things to consider regarding the flow...

1) Even taking an as yet unknown event into account (major war, major economic troubles etc) the facts are that mainline AA has massive retirement gaps to fill and it isn’t even clear yet how they are going to accomplish this by the early/mid 2020’s. Even if they decide to park some planes, chances are they wouldn’t have much of a need to furlough because of retirements. Any hiccups in these regards won’t really affect time to flow by any drastic amount in my opinion.

2) There will be massive amounts of turnover and attrition going forward in addition to those above you who are flowing. We haven’t even really begun seeing the real wave of retirements just yet and things are already changing rapidly (mostly for the better) in the regional industry. The flood gates will be wide open at the legacies within the next couple years. Having a 4 year degree might not even matter that much to them as everyone is in a race to hire pilots (don’t quote me on the degree part it’s just a hunch I have looking at the numbers). And this doesn’t even include any potential expansion plans at the legacies. And let’s not forget FedEx, UPS, Southwest (who recently revised UP their need for pilots due to early retirements), the LCCs who have a ton of expansion plans etc. And speaking

I’m actually not entirely sure what will end up happening in these regards. The president of the WO I worked at has said that AA looked into absorbing the WOs a couple of years back but that, “it didn’t make sense financially”. Well that was a long while back (by airline industry standards) and much has already changed since then. There is in fact a financial tipping point to where it makes more sense bringing the WO feed in-house. We aren’t there yet, but in 2-3 years who knows? If you would have told me 2-3 years ago that regionals would be looking at rates like what Endeavor is enjoying I would have laughed at you. But it’s the new reality for them and likely will be for the WOs by mid to late 2018.

Some other relatively minor things to think about if you are considering a WO for the flow:

1) Legislative changes that may have an effect on the retirement age. I personally think that there will be an increased retirement


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