Originally Posted by
EagleVol
Thats not a good analogy. Once again, you are assuming that all flows are trying to get out of the WO to the first airline that calls and only flow if no one else calls. That's not true. A lot of the flows have no desire to go to anywhere but AA and AA pretty much only hires through the flow or military. We all weren't passed up by United, Delta, UPS, and FedEx. They didn't get to cherry pick all the good candidates and AA is left with just ok ones. A good portion of us never even apply to those places because we didn't want to work there.
Sure if a guy has a competitive resume to all those other airlines and is still a long way to flow, then they would be dumb to not apply to the others. However, if a guy still needs time at the regionals to be competitive and AA is their 1st choice then there is nothing wrong with waiting to flow. Think of it as their interview is successfully working at a WO for around a decade. If they have attitude problems, they will probably wash out before their probation year is over. I'd bet that is a very small percentage.
Originally Posted by
EagleVol
I fail to see the problem with this. As long as they are a good pilot and good to work with, then why does it matter if someone chooses the safer route? Seems smart to me. Personally, I wouldn't have ever considered an LCC or ULCC because that is not where I wanted to spend the rest of my career and didn't want to risk getting stuck there. Also I promise that there was nothing easy about working at Envoy for 8.5 years, but it got me to where I ultimately wanted to be, so I'm grateful for the opportunity that it gave me.
There is absolutely no problem with this, but you are further proving my point while contradicting what you stated earlier in that most of the flows really want to go to AA and nowhere else. This is simply not the case or most of those pilots would be applying and making a serious effort to get in the door as quickly as possible.
For example, take one of my friends who was hired off the street at AA a few years ago and recently became one of the youngest CAs, if not the youngest, at American. Do you think that guy went to Envoy and waited on a flow thru program? Dude really wanted to be there and made it happen without the flow.
I'm genuinely happy that you ended up where you ultimately wanted to be, but don't kid yourself that everyone else feels the same way about AA being the end all be all for themselves. Again from my experience and the pilots THAT I PERSONALLY KNOW, none are making a concerted effort to get there outside of the flow program. It does not make any one of them any less of a pilot, it just is what it is. They evidently just don't want to be at AA that badly, but will gladly take it as a handout. Like I said earlier, the path of least resistance. Pilots are lazy by nature and we know this because we're all pilots. You can't BS the BSer.