The flow time dropped to 7 years for the last guy to get hired pre-Corona.

This argument about flow times starts off with easy math, then gets clouded up by a bunch of estimates that nobody can accurately predict.

First the easy math. There are just over 2200 people in line to flow at Envoy. Flow has a cap of 20 pilots per month. The most junior guy on list, Mike Teavee, (and the next pilot hired) starts off looking at a flow date 9 years 2 months after AA starts hiring.

To improve that time, the flow requires attrition. To get to 5 years, the number of people flowing ahead of Mike needs to drop from 2200 to 1200. 1000 people ahead of him (nearly half) need to get out of the way in some fashion in the next 60 months.

The first year has the most movement, as there will be several who either don't pass training, get hired someplace else, or just plain quit Envoy because it sucks. The people getting hired someplace else are generally the more experienced ones, or they hold a real golden ticket. After the second year, attrition slows to a trickle.

Some will argue that the flow is only one way to AA and you can still get hired at AA through the normal application process. True, but being at Envoy does not seem to help those chances. In the last year, less than 1 pilot per month from Envoy has been a non-flow hire at AA.

Working against the flow, well, we are seeing that now. Flow is tied to AA monthly hiring and limited to 20 per month, with no backlog. Ideally for Mike, AA will only hire 60 pilots per month, every month, until he flows. However, if AA hires 120 in August, but 0 in September, Envoy will only flow 20 for the 2 months. If AA hires 120 again in October, Envoy only flows 20 pilots, September is a lost month for flow purposes.

Pre-corona, AA was looking at hiring 100+ per month. This is bad for Mike because that means every month, 40 extra guys are placed on the AA seniority list ahead of him from outside sources. After 5 years assuming everything else works out for Mike, he'll have an additional 2,400 pilots ahead of him on the seniority list compared to if AA only hired 60 per month.

Historically, attrition has been more dependable, but I doubt that attrition will continue in the future. Right now, 2/3s of the pilots on the list have been on property less than 3 years. Most are not competitive at other places because they are still either FOs or they are newly minted CA's without 1000 hours TPIC.

All of this could change if AA/Envoy decides to either increase flow rates or start hiring from Envoy through the application process. The primary reason for flow is to keep Envoy staffed while paying lower salaries. I don't see the flow cap getting raised until Envoy finds it difficult to recruit for new hire classes again.

The only other way I could see it happening is if someone starts a class action lawsuit and wins because Envoy advertised 5 year flow times that they never delivered on.