I would venture a guess that the majority of pilots at the American wholly owned regionals don’t have their apps in anywhere. It’s understandable to some degree. It takes about 4-5 years for a regional pilot to gain the experience to be realistically competitive. And by that time they’re looking at 1-2 years left to flow to mainline American. Many still try to get out but I see a lot of qualified pilots apply and never get called and just end up flowing.
And conversely the vast majority of pilots I talk to at other regionals aren’t even applying at American because the number of off the street civilians hired is very small. So they are all competing for the jobs at Delta, UA, FedEx, SWA, etc