Mandatory retirements at mainline really don’t matter because they aren’t what affects flow.

The purpose of the flow is to staff the REGIONALS. Anyone who believes different is delusional. AA mainline can meet it’s entire hiring needs with military hires and OTS hires from other regionals and the 135 and ACMI world. They don’t NEED flow to get qualified guys in the door.

AA will throttle the flow to whatever extent is necessary to keep the regional staffed. If you want to increase throughput to AA you need to increase recruiting and training and even retention at the wholly owneds themselves.

Lots of quality people coming in at the bottom and good retention of those people gets more coming out at the top. That’s the only thing that will really shorten flow. That requires better pay. And that will require a commitment from AA which historically they have been reluctant to do because it defeats the whole purpose of using the carrot of flow to reduce costs for their regional feed.

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