Originally Posted by
nuball5
Wow that’s a lot of detail, nice job. The only thing I disagree with is that attrition to the Legacies will increase past 2026, I think it will decrease. You start falling behind the retirement power curve if you don’t start making plans to leave in the next few years...Delta especially who’s been hiring like gangbusters for several years now. American Airlines might be the only place someone in their thirties would see the left seat of a wide-body, but they hire very little off the street.
2026 and beyond is obviously far away, so it’s more of wild guess.
Only data I have is from 2018 in DAL's contract comparison guide, which got its data from SWAPA in Dec 2017. So it is almost 2 years old. Basically total retirements from Big 4 PAX carriers goes from 2k total next year up to about 2500 in 2023, stabilizes there for a few years, goes to 2400 in 2027 to 2300 to eventually 2,250 in 2030...but there are still plenty of retirements. Add in FDX/UPS it's even higher. It's mostly a flat curve with only a slight decline, even beyond 2025. AA has the most, DAL the next highest until 2025, then UAL takes over from DAL. But all show at least 500 a year for the big 3 thru 2030, generally more like 700 a year. SWA doesn't have as many, but theirs picks up to 300+ in the mid 2020s.
The thing is, if we hypothetically stay organic forever, and we keep a 10-15 plane per year growth, which is about at the top end of what I would estimate once you consider some of the 320s that will have to be retired at some point in the mid-late 2020s, our growth will eventually be slow enough on a percentage basis, with slower retirements, that it will still make sense to go to a legacy even after a year or 2 at JB. End of 2025, I'd expect our list to be roughly 5500-5700 if we take all the planes on time. So if we grew by 200-250 pilots a year at that point (after the CBA staffing increase this year and next, likely requiring 300-400 hires to cover attrition depending on the year at that point), which is about what 10-15 planes a year would need, a person's percentage increase on a seniority list at JB would be low enough that they'd still be better off going to an airline with more retirements and with a lot of wide body jobs, where they would gain relative seniority and more career options faster than sitting at the bottom of a slow growing (percentage wise), slow retirement list (sorry for the long-@ss sentence but I'm not changing it).
Point is I think our annual seniority percentage increases will stay lower than legacies once we grow more, and they (as of now) offer more pay, career options, etc., enticing people to keep their apps in with legacies. But I could be wrong.
I'll caveat this analysis with the fact that I think by 2025 a recession will have hit (impacting total fleet/hiring), more M&A will have occurred, and the likelihood of any of this panning out as I predict is slim to none. If JB stays organic (or depending on who they merged with if that happened), I'd also bet there will be WBs (or at least orders) by 2025, which also changes things.
All this to say: I have no idea...all I have is a bunch of current data for today, some outdated forward looking data on retirements, but I certainly don't have a crystal ball for career expectations at JB or any other airline, or future attrition, or JB's ability to attract and retain pilots at that point (I guess they better hope CBA 2022 is a little better relative to peers than it is now, or perhaps have something else in mind like pumping up the gateway 0 to hero program?).