It ain't just the sims, it's the money. That's why TSH doesn't want to sell Compass as a singleton although they have allegedly had offers. Let's make it simple and conservative and not consider FAs, MX, etc. let's just do it on the back of a napkin? Let's make some conservative assumptions. Can you type rate a class in 3 months? Maybe. It's taking Mesa about six months currently (but that's Mesa) and because of systemwide sim availability issues most people are doing it closer to four currently, but let's go with your three months just for giggles and say you are right. Now if you are talking about a class of twenty, I'll concede you can probably do that, but not a class of 300, which is what it will take to staff 36 aircraft. Ain't going to happen. Not even if you are type rating all guys with existing 121 time. But let's suspend disbelief and pretend that it will. What's the price tag on that?


Well, first of all, there is the cost of the sims and instructors and FPTs. That's going to be about $15 grand a unit, but let's just call it $10 grand a unit. $10,000 X 300 = $3 million.

Hotel and per Diem costs for the trainees. $60 per room per night (contract rate)plus $24 in per diem X 90 nights X 300 pilots = $2.7 million.

Then we are looking at wages.


One hundred fifty of those guys are going to be existing captains. Let's assume they are all year five guys making $95 an hour with a 401K contribution of $5 an hour to make it an even $100 an hour.
$100 X 75 hour training minimum X 3 months x150 guys = $3.375 million.

Now if the other 150 guys are total newbie's - which would be cheapest but not necessarily the safest - you'd only be looking at $50 an hour X 75 X 3 X 150 = $1.69 million.

So before we look at actually setting up new bases out West, where the flying is, somebody has got to front load this with about $11 million, just to get the pilots up to speed, and that does NOT cover relocation costs or what that does to the rest of the regional's pilot requirements because unless existing flying is going away, you still have to train to offset those shifted to the new bases and new equipment.

Now $11 million isn't huge money, I'll grant you, compared to the cost of even a single aircraft, but it isn't chump change either and by the time you toss in maintenance, FAs, and the rest of the infrastructure, it's almost always going to be cheaper to buy an existing certificate and consolidate flying than just move aircraft around, unless you are dealing with a real old Pilot group with a lot of lifers, which sure isn't the case at Compass. Compass, sold as a functional entity, is probably $20 - 25 million cheaper than reconstituting the pilot group and avoids the opportunity cost and capital cost of 35 aircraft sitting around for three months ( and far more likely much longer than that).

And the financial and HR people all know this, of course. A couple of different companies - including Delta and Republic I believe - woukd be happy to buy Compass with their operations (in Delta's case, with Endeavor and then let the unions argue the SLI)) and that may even happen someday depending on how much might be saved by such a consolidation. My personal opinion is that both Delta and HK woukd like to see the other guy blink first and come out ahead of the game and that at least to a degree both are sort of playing chicken.

That's my take on the situation anyway, FWIW.