Originally Posted by
TransWorld
Agreed by a lot. Put some numbers to it.
Over the next 20 years, US majors retirements will be about 50,000.
The amount of hiring over those next 20 years, all of North America is estimated at 90,000 per Boeing. This is retirements, attrition, and growth.
There are 20,000 regional pilots. Old rule of thumb is 10% lifers. That means 18,000 regional pilots interested in moving up.
Even if Boeing’s forecast is on the high side. (I don’t think it is.) — it just kind of takes one’s breath away.
A lot of new hires will have to get hired by the regionals and move up, or get hired directly by the majors like they did several decades ago.
Let's say there are 18,000 at regionals looking to move on, and 50,000 pilots needed over 20 years. If we were to presume even distribution that is 2,500 pilots per year.
At 2,500 pilots per year it would take just over 7 years to deplete the regionals. But if you look at it another way, if regionals hired 2,500 pilots per year into their ranks the average time at a regional would end up being around 7 years.
If you use 90,000, we get to 4,500 pilots per year.
At 4,500 pilots per year the turnover of 18,000 pilots would be 4 years. So if regionals could actually hire 4,500 pilots per year, they could still hold a pilot on average for 4 years before they would go to a major and meet the numbers. Realistically you'd still have military pilots skipping the regionals so the actual number for them would be a bit lower.
With those numbers, the bottleneck isn't pilots going to regionals and building more time to go to majors, it's pilots getting their initial training and then the minimum hours to go to the regionals in the first place. If the initial training capacity was there, the timeline for pilots at regionals would seem fairly reasonable.
However, with that bottleneck, I still feel like the regionals will no longer be effective or sustainable in their current form. Rather than multiple certificates and pilot groups flying the same equipment, a single certificate is a more efficient use of pilots to move airplanes. Upgauging routes and reducing frequency is another method to do that. You need twice as many pilots to move 100 people from CMH - ATL with a 50 seat RJ than a C series 100. The scale applies going up including the 76 seaters as well. I think a lot of these communities that see 4-6 RJ flights a day have a big potential to see 2-3 larger mainline a/c partly just to reduce the crew demands.