Originally Posted by
RJSAviator76
There’s plenty of exaggeration on these boards, but one cannot discard the amount of people hired by Delta over the past 5 years, many much younger than your stereotypical applicant in his late 30’s/early 40’s.
As a number of people here say that one hired now can have a great narrowbody captain career at Delta or as a WB FO, it doesn’t stack that well against UAL or AA going forward as they started hiring much later in the game and have way more retirements coming up.
What do you guys think?
Most of my new hire class was late 30s or early 40s or later. Where are you getting your numbers? How do you define "many?"
The majority of AA's positions are spoken for due to the flows. If you aren't military it is around 99% of the positions, they aren't in the ballpark for the discussion as far a place most applicants can realistically plan to go.
UA is focusing on concessions to allow more RJs, I'm skeptical they will get there, but you never know. In any case they've been claiming plans to hire as many as Delta for the last few years and have failed to deliver. How they are compensating for that man fewer bodies (and why) is up for discussion as well. The numbers say you'll eventually get good movement at United, you'll get good movement at Delta immediately. The movement argument is that DAL isn't as good to go to because they are the ones actually hiring.
I also think it's incredibly shortsighted to only look at hiring so far for why you would go somewhere. This board may be a bit biased, but I think that Delta is the best run of the majors and I think that means a lot for prospective outlooks.
Delta also has a lot better soft money and other benefits. Even the nonrev benefits are very different. AA is apparently first come first serve for nonrev, I guess that's good while you're junior, but you get no advantage after that. Profit sharing might as well exist at AA and UA compared to DAL. Right now that alone is a 10% premium on pay.