We hired around 1000/year pre-merger in the late 90s hiring wave but a few things have changed since then including the merger which increased training capacity and more recently the more aggressive simulator schedule.

So overall we have a lot more capacity now but we also have a more complicated fleet and more retirements now, although we were dealing with retirements in that timeframe also - just not on the level we are now seeing.

We also outsourced some training back then so simulator availability or lack of availability could either help or hinder our training potential. The biggest burden I see is the huge number of retirements off the top resulting in cascading training requirements which can cause major churn in many categories as Pilots move up the food chain. I sure hope we don’t contemplate any addition to seat locks in section 6 as we already are lagging our peers in that regard.

It will be interesting.

Scoop