View Single Post
Old 07-31-2020, 09:05 AM
  #42  
Excargodog
Perennial Reserve
 
Excargodog's Avatar
 
Joined APC: Jan 2018
Posts: 11,409
Default It’s now got even worse...

Originally Posted by Excargodog View Post
it’s actually somewhat worse




The early retirement programs will have prematurely retired many of the senior pilots that would have been retiring from the legacies over the next 1-4 years and several of the legacies are now downsizing because they don’t expect either international or business flying to be coming back any time soon, so there is that.

Come 1 October there are Likely going to be people at both regionals and majors furloughed. It gets worse for the regionals next year, because several will be affected by the scope agreements from their major once this year of greatly decreased flying by the major is accrued in the books. Those scope agreements will force less flying at the regionals as a consequence of this years less flying at the majors. Because if that, it is very likely several more regionals will go out of business, furloughing their pilots as well. So there is that.

Up until about six months ago all the military pilots eligible for retirement (less a handful of flag officer or wannabes) and a whole lot of military pilots coming up on the end of their ADSC were putting in paperwork to get out. Well THAT came to a screaming halt, and all those people pulled their separation paperwork or retirement paperwork and are now just sort of hanging out. That is already 500 pilots and increasing by 1000 pilots a year.

All of these people are going to be hired (or rehired) long before anyone who doesn’t already have an ATP and a type rating in AT LEAST a CRJ or Q400. That’s just reality, so you are probably looking - assuming passenger demand becomes normal next summer and you meet criteria for an ATP - at being behind at least 3000 or so far better qualified and more competitive other people competing for a substantially reduced number of Regional and major job openings.

Yeah, that’s absolutely nothing like you were told to expect when you started your training - probably three or more years ago if you are anywhere close to ATP mins now, and that sucks. But it is the reality, or at least a close approximation of it.

A couple of new developments.

Expressjet has now joined the ranks of Compass and TSA in being shutdown. That’s another 1300 regional pilots, many with over a decade of regional experience, now being added to the 1600 or so already furloughed when Compass and TSA were shut down. But that hasn’t stopped the bleeding at the regional level. WARN notices have gone out to the junior pilots of a number of other regionals. Furloughed regional pilots could easily top 4500 by 1 October.

United has indicated that they may be furloughing as many as 3900 pilots in two different waves. That’s a third of their total pilot group. It takes two waves because of the training churn caused by furloughs in multi-type fleets where someone can easily find themselves displaced into an aircraft they don’t have a type rating for. And this is even after exhausting the volunteers for early retirement. But it isn’t just the 3900 additional well trained And competitive guys added to the backlog, it’s the reduced flying that United and other Majors with scope limitations are doing this year. Some of those scope limitations are based - at least in part - upon total mainline flying hours while others are based on total mainline narrow body flying. The former has been hit hard by COVID and the latter by retirement of older airframes as fleet types are eliminated to try to rein in the training churn and overhead. Both will put downward pressure in scope, which may be reflected in more regionals going out of business next year.

Now this too, will pass, but the job picture is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets much better, and the longer it takes to get back to normal, the greater the backlog of military fliers ready and able to become ex-military fliers. It may be a decade before 121 job conditions are as favorable for a guy or gal with a new ATP as they were only two or three years ago.
Excargodog is offline