Xdashdriver

Ramping up hiring and training takes quite a bit of forward planning. Training new hires from start date takes around 3 months. Add to that the application process, interviewing etc and you can easily need a 5-6 month lead time to get a pilot out on the line from the date you make the decision to start hiring. I think Frontier is eager to capture as much of the rebound in demand as it can as it happens. When we've experienced lulls in the pandemic, demand has picked up reasonably quickly. Now that we have multiple effective vaccines getting approved, demand will likely start to return. Even though this third wave of the pandemic in the US has been pretty brutal, we haven't experienced the same precipitous drop in demand as the first wave. Frontier's customer base has been historically more resilient and quicker to return to the skies after previous downturns. Frontier also has access to a large amount of cash that puts it in a relatively strong financial position. All the recent route announcements are clues that we are transitioning slowly back to growth mode. Put all that together and you can definitely see the rationale for planning hiring. That's not to say it will definitely happen. As management has mentioned over and over again, we're in new territory here, so while they have to plan for the future, those plans are subject to change.