Unless there is some major expansion announced at the end of our Airbus transition in November (which is very possible), I do not see any hiring at all for the remainder of this year and likely into to at least the beginning of 2019.
We are pretty fat on pilots. Our latest seniority list shows 896 pilots which is down from our high of 908 in January. A portion of these are management pilots.
Right now, we have about 93 airplanes. According to the latest posted financial report, by the end of the year we will be down to 77 airplanes.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alleg...200100911.html They are targeting 4 airplanes as spares which seems impossibly low given our geographic diversity.
I would venture to say that any other LCC airline probably has their airplanes available for revenue about 18 hours per day and staffs each airplane with about 10 pilots per plane on average. Allegiant's aircraft utilization is lower. Allegiant's pilot utilization is about the same but is being targeted lower to 7.6 pilots per airplane by 2020 which also seems impossibly low (source: Investor Day 2017 document).
Not hard to see the math.
This is a growth airline whose growth has been interrupted for a year because of the aircraft transition. I am sure we will be back in growth mode very soon.