Originally Posted by Excargodog

Yet hiring away their pilots would make the situation worse, not better. Because those pilots would be replaced by new - more junior - pilots who would be costing the ULCC/LCC even LESS money because they would be more junior and even lower on the Payscale.

A lot of people seem to believe that the majors actually WANT to populate. Their pilot group with 25 year olds so they wouldn’t have to find a replacement for 45 years. Well they don’t. An initial type-rating is actually pretty cheap, not a whole lot more money than annual recurrency training. And it isn’t as if a 25 year old pilot would only get one type rating during his/her career at a major. Recruiting replacement pilots is not a major expense either. If major airlines really had their druthers, they’d probably take nothing but 45 year old retired military pilots, some one who already has one pension and government provided health care. Somebody with a long history of NOT being in a union.

Then they’d have them be an FO for ten years, upgrade them for their last ten years, then give them their gold watch and send them on their way. They’d only be at the top rung of the salary ladder for eight of those years, whereas someone hired at age 25 would spend 28 years there. Do the math. The ANNUAL savings in pay woukd more than cover the costs of providing ‘new’ retirees with a type rating. And that’s REALLY why the legacies will fall all over themselves to take some 45 year old retired O-5 or O-6 with less than 2500 hours who flew an A-10 until he made major and then flew a desk for the past 10 years over someone with 2500 hours of 121 time from one of their own regional feeders.

It’s not like they need to hedge their bets they may need to bomb or strafe someone, it’s that they are making money on the regional pilot right where he is, and a succession of retired military old farts will keep the payline down.

And yeah, while they are really not above hiring away some people from an ULCC, what they would really like to see is those people stick around long enough that the demographics of the ULCC become - like that of the legacy - MORE SENIOR so the ULCC won’t have near as much of a payroll advantage. Bad enough that a 12 year legacy captain costs 50% more than a 12 year LCC captain, but the AVERAGE pilot at an ULCC may only be at the three year point in pay while the legacy has thousands of senior pilots and an average seniority if 20+ years.

With both airlines flying the same equipment and buying fuel from the same vendors a more junior workforce is the big advantage the LCC/ULCC has.