And I think this is the key point. Only 2-3 years ago people were recommending that noobies go to a regional where - if it all hit the fan - you could survive that being your career destination or at least picking one that had flow as a backup, however distant that backup might be. It was a tacit admission that regionals weren’t really ANYBODY’S career desire. Oh yeah, you could certainly survive as a senior CA at most places, and eventually if you got sufficiently embedded in life at your regional base, sufficiently senior, and sufficiently old, it wouldn’t even make sense to move what was left of your family and start over as a junior reserve FO at a major, assuming you even got the offer after spending 20 years with your last type rating being in an obsolescent 50 pax jet. But that was then and this is now.

You can get by with just a cadre of senior guys to do the instructing and the LCA work, but you need over 50% of the pilots being captains to make the airline function. That’s because the CAs have more vacation time, use more sick leave, and are better able to get soft and premium time to fill up their schedule than those with lesser seniority. Yet just the same, you need a CA in every aircraft for every hour an FO flies.

Naw, the problem isn’t finding a few lifers, it’s getting enough to stick around long enough after they have their first 1000 hours of 121 time to AVERAGE another 1000 hours flying as a CA, when even the traditional 1000 hrs of TPIC that was once the minimum entry ticket to a major is no longer necessary. THAT is the problem.