Originally Posted by
e6bpilot
Exactly. Breeze is taking advantage of market conditions to hire pilots for a bargain who are looking to maybe capitalize on being at the top of a seniority list of a young airline.
The PPP money was paid out to existing airlines to ensure that there wasn't a huge pullback in capacity that would hurt a recovery and to guarantee jobs in a huge industry. There is no victim here. Breeze wasn't even flying airplanes when COVID went down and so they haven't had to endure the loss of millions to billions of dollars.
This is going to play out just like JetBlue. The airline will mature, Neeleman will get bored and pull chocks, and they will eventually, after much hand wringing and consternation, pay their pilots a market wage. That's if they don't get bought out. I give it 10 years for either scenario.
Breeze also appears as though they will have bases in smaller sun-belt cities that many pilots may want to reside in, and will hire based on people actually working out of these cities. If you look, although the pilot job posting has been taken down, but the FA job postings are by city, so they will most likely do the same for pilots once they start hiring again. They also reduce their costs by flying turns out of these cities, so the pilots can return home and sleep in their own bed every night, and the company doesn't have to buy hotel rooms. Some pilots may enjoy flying, but have other interests outside of aviation as well, and want to land at home in Florida on the last day of their trip, not stare at a stand-by board at 9pm hoping to get on a severely delayed flight, which if they miss means they'll be spending the night in the airport, or buying a hotel room. Some pilots don't want anything to do with reserve or crash pads in *insert your favorite crime/riot ridden major city/airline hub here*. The pay at Jetblue was probably sub-standard for an A320 when they started, but there are plenty of regional lifers flying right now, who will retire from the regionals, who wish they had not passed up an opportunity at Jetblue back in the early 2000s thinking mainline would take them soon. The big three legacy airlines also use low pilot pay to cut costs, if they didn't regional airlines wouldn't exist. Hell, Delta is so desperate to keep 35 RJs in their fleet, that they did a shameless about-face and decided to give Endeavor a flow and proudly stated that it's only so that they could keep the 35 RJs they would have to get rid of if they didn't. Breeze is just a start-up, the wage depression comes from the large, too big to fail airlines, not from start-ups flying a few routes marketed towards leisure travel.