Originally Posted by
ShyGuy
I’ve heard this numerous times for much smaller carriers, like when Virgin was only about 600 pilots. “The legacies can shut down Virgin, all they have to do is hire all 600 pilots over 3 legacies in 6 months!” It. Never. Happens. Heard the same things about Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, Sun Country, even jetBlue when they were smaller. It’s just pilot group think that’s not grounded in the reality of legacy airline hiring practices.
It would actually be illegal to blatantly, intentionally, target a competitor's employees en masse. The slots and gates (and maybe planes) would *normally* have more value than pilots, so an acquisition would normally be how it would go down.
But if the shortage gets bad enough, there's nothing to stop them from hiring any who bother to apply if they have reasonably competitive resumes... and by definition most AS pilots should have decent resumes (compared to CFI's or noob regional FO's).