I'm not there (yet), but I simply disagree that it will take 10 years to get from ANY regional to the majors for someone starting now. Past performance is not indicative of future results. In 7 years, when every legacy is hemorrhaging pilots and the international aviation scene has continued exploding, no-one should be sitting at a regional for 10 years unless they have major skeletons in their closet.

Republic, if you're being pessimistic, has 3-year upgrades. Depending on the way things shake out, it could bottom out at 1.5-2, or it could start going back up towards 3. Regardless, you're talking about a candidate who spends 7 years in the left seat, and saying they would be minimally-qualified with 8000+ hours and 4500+ hours of TPIC. That is a person who would be more than qualified NOW, seeing as median times are around 5000TT for new hires at the legacies.

That just isn't realistic, irrespective of any growth or lack thereof, given the movement at the top of the industry over the next 10-15 years. Recessions et al. won't stop the retirements. It may stop the growth (and may even induce some limited contraction, though I'm skeptical that would be industry-wide), but even in a no-growth scenario, those pilots will still be retiring.

The guys getting hired right now at the legacies are the last of the pilots that suffered through the late 2000s and early 2010s, and the last major group of potential legacy pilots with higher TTs. Their times are high because they didn't have the luxury of considerable movement at the top of the industry for any of their career, just organic growth and a slow trickle of retirements.

But that is a limited group of pilots, and they've either mostly moved on, or decided they'd rather be a "lifer" at the top of the regional food chain. Who is behind them? No one. The guys that were hired in the mid 2010s, at the very beginning of this boom, now sitting with a 4-5K TT and 2-3K TPIC. They're (impatiently) waiting for the call, having been sold a promise of a pilot shortage, that, simply put, is just getting started. Once that pilot profile (4-5K TT, 2-3K TPIC) becomes a well-qualified pilot after the "sufferers" of the 2000s-early 2010s have all moved on, who will replace those guys as the "stretch" hires? The ones that you hear of getting calls, but not with any regularity? It could only be the 1 year regional captains, with 3-4K TT, 1K TPIC).

I very firmly believe the days of 8-10K hour regional pilots getting hired at the legacies being the norm is over. Will there be guys moving from the LCCs, cargo, etc. to the legacies with those times? Sure. There will be lots of movement all over the place. But those guys are largely a strawman in a discussion of regional movement, except for the regional pilots that move to those jobs.

It's a math problem, and the legacies will always take priority, leaving the regionals to figure it out for themselves. Some, like Delta and American, aren't completely divested from that because they depend directly on the operation of their wholly-owneds. When Delta, American, United, and Southwest combined are needing 2500-3000 pilots a year for at least 5 years in the mid 2020s, the vast majority of those will come from the regionals, because there's nowhere else that has pilots that A) are motivated to leave/move on, and B) have the numbers to meet the demand. Let's assume there are about 25K regional pilots right now, of which half are captains (~12,500). By the mid 2020s, I'd guess about 15% of those captains will be needed at just the four legacies (roughly 1500 per year, the remainder of the 2500-3000 legacy hires coming OTS from OA, 135, etc.). Each year. That doesn't account for any hires at any airlines other than those 4. Add to that the hiring needs at other airlines that aren't legacies (e.g. Fedex, Spirit, UPS, JetBlue, international, etc.), you're probably doubling the demand for regional captains, meaning roughly 30% of regional captains will be moving on each year. Compare that to today, where that number is more like 5-8%. That's a big difference.

I think people have a lot of justified PTSD from the last 15 years, and that interference is preventing people from recognizing the fundamental differences in the industry now vs. times past (e.g. industry consolidation making airlines more financially stable). That isn't to say there won't be new challenges and difficulties (e.g., the regional model as a whole), but acting like conditions now represent anything approaching what things will look like in 5-10 years is completely wrong.

The math simply doesn't add up.