Originally Posted by
nAAtive
I guess I’m failing to see the difference in what they are doing versus what we are doing. They said 5000 new pilots over four years. That’s 1,250 a year on average. People are saying (compass project people) we are going to hire 1,100 to 1,500 in 2020. And we are still seven above our projected hiring numbers for 2019.
They are smaller than AA, they were dramatically smaller at the time of the AA/Airways merger and they have quickly closed the gap. It looks like they will overtake AA in size this coming decade just as Delta has done already. If AA retires 10,000 they will hire 10,000. UAL is going to retire 5,000 and they respond by hiring 10,000. At the time of the merger AA was the world’s biggest airline by a large margin. Now we are number 2 and quickly approaching number 3. It just seems unfortunate that our network team is cautious to the point of losing market share.