Originally Posted by FlyGuy2021

I think you missed the whole point. The whole "hire accordingly off of the street" is the problem. They simply can't. The legacy airlines are predicting that they will have significant difficulty hiring within the next 12 months. There simply are not 5000 "legacy airline" candidates available anywhere except for their own regional feeds. 1000 or so great candidates will come from military/91/135, but most companies only count on 1/2 of the military pilots that they hire available for the first few years anyways with guard/reserve obligations.

A true staple will never happen, and we all know that. But how they play it out will be interesting. Companies will be parking regional jets by April, and the mainline carriers can not afford to lose their regional feed next summer. There has already been a lot of up-gauging of service, and this will continue as more mainline aircraft are added. Markets that were previously only served by regionals are now getting mainline jets with fewer flights per day.

Just remember, if they could hire all they wanted, they would not be paying massive retention bonuses at the regionals. The legacy airlines don't want their competition to poach their regional feed because they need those pilots.