A very interesting conversation indeed. Paid or unpaid training, the company is going to have a hard time finding takers. Some furloughed pilots from other airlines with no other current employment prospects might roll the dice and jump on it, but no regional or corporate pilot in their right mind would leave a paying job for a chance at an Airbus type rating and some quality time on COLA-0. I see where the company is coming from as far as wanting to be ready to pounce when the time is right, but doing it while we still have pilots lacking a paycheck is madness. MAYbe I could be on board if all COLA-0/ELS pilots were back on the line and the company wanted to hire pilots into 0 hour lines - to be waiting in the shadows awaiting the call to be activated at a later date.

I can’t imagine that the union wouldn’t fight tooth and nail if new hires in training were going to be collecting min guarantee while some pilots on the line aren’t getting a paycheck. I could imagine that the company could try to get around this by not paying these COLA-0 pilots in training and claiming that they aren’t really “hired” until the completion of training. However, in that case, I think the new Frontier definition of “hired” would go down in the history books... right next to Bill Clinton’s meaning of the word “is”.