Originally Posted by
O2pilot
Yes. But some guys just want to be negative and look at what they don't have or didn't get, instead of what they have now. I've been here 23+ years and its as good now as it was when we have 2 year guppy Captains in the late 90s. Now we have two new-hire classes a month with 40 pilots in each class. I think from now to 2020 its going to be pretty nice with a lot of movement while we have 20+ 787s being delivered in the next 24 months, monthly vacancy bids, and lots of retirements.
Bottom line if guys can complain when things are this good, they are going to complain all the time.
It’s all perspective. You say we got it good and we have 2 new hire classes with 40 each right now(all 40 ppl in each class aren’t new hires either) I’ll agree that’s good. We have done this hiring since Sept of this year. So for this year we got this good thing going for 4 months, which is roughly 320 new hires and a “good start”.
Although, we had a lot more hiring planned earlier this year and we cut that off in March, then trickled a little bit until September.
Take a look at our competition because that is the big yardstick with which we can compare. United is by far the most difficult airline to get hired at right now by far in the last 5 years. Out of my last 25 friends hired, 1 has gotten hired at UAL, the probably 20 at SWA and DL and about 4 at AA. That’s a small sample size, but literally none of those other 24 even got an interview at United, if you can believe that...
SWA has basically never stopped hiring and since their merger, they have grown and picked up steam. They have about 150-200 retirees a year but have hired close to 1000 each year in the past 3 years. Delta has hired close to 1000 pilot each year for the past 3 years and the 3 years before that they were hiring over 500 a year.
American is basically at the same pace as us(replace retirements) but remember they started out merged with 14,500.
These last 4 months is the only real time since the merger where we have hired as much as our competitors. Right now things are looking good, but will this stop again in March or May?
I’m not saying these are bad times, but since these are “amazing” times for our competitors, please excuse me if I don’t share some people’s “gumdrops and rainbows” analysis.
When our pilot list breaks 13,000, then 13,500, when DL and SWA stays static, I’ll agree that we are kicking butt, but excuse me if I like to see us stay on par and maybe even win some battles with our competition.