Originally Posted by
UAL97
We shall know soon. SK has always wanted to be aggressive since he's been here. How competitive can we be on the recovery if we have 3900 pilots on the street vs only 1600/1900 at our main competitors?
Furloughing 3900 is essentially equal to 5000 when you figure in 1100 early outs plus retirements over the next couple of years. Do you think we can recover in any sort of efficient fashion by cutting that deeply? It will be a very cumbersome process to undo all the displacements and retrain the furloughed pilots, even with the shorter requal training footprints that are currently approved.
I think this is the reason why ALPA and the company are in mitigation talks. TK is already jammed up with the very few displacements they've already begun to train. They've realized that furloughing such a massive amount is just not practical or cost efficient to be positioned properly for a recovery, which (let's be honest) no one has a clue of when it may happen.
The only way I can see 3900 as a feasible furlough number is if there are merger plans on the horizon.
From what I understand, the number of new instructors that need to be trained to get us to the 3900 number would take some time and significantly slow the process. Also, there is nothing that prevents our competitors from having a second round of furloughs. After a vaccine is found, it will take some time to distribute it, show that it works, and build the public’s confidence. Hopefully that can happen before we get too deep into the next wave, but I have no doubt that they will cut to where they want to be. Like you say, Kirby is aggressive and I’m glad he’s there instead of another Tilton or Smisek. My guess is that he doesn’t want to cut deeper than the competition, but if they go deeper, I expect him to do the same.