Originally Posted by
Rightup
Even if there was a major airline shortage, it would not last very long. If by "shortage" we assume the LCCs taking guys at 1500 hours or not much later, there would be a MASSIVE increase in flight school enrollments due to media coverage and the general population spouting that "in <5 years you'll be making 150k+." No real artificial barriers of entry (other than cost of training) compared to other professions either.
We got pretty close to that, ULCC's routinely hiring 2500 hour regional FO's. There was some artificiality in that though, they didn't want guys with TPIC who would likely get called by the bigs in the near (alternate) future.