Originally Posted by
JustAsking
how many pilots are there? APC says there are 2400 (info could be dated) but if 95 leave every month, that means they would loose almost 2400 in 2 years. I know they replace/hire every month also, but at that rate a new hire today could be at the top of the list in 2 years?
No ... expanding
FO's are pretty much a renewable resource and, assuming infinite capacity to recruit and train, can be replaced over and over and over again with no fundamental threat to the system. Captains and LCA's however, pretty much have to be grown in house. Yes DEC's are a thing but there's not a huge supply of regional applicants with upgrade mins.
So you need FO's to stick around until they upgrade. And then you need the new captains to stick around long enough to fly 1000 hours with their replacement. And you need a subset of those people to stay as LCA's. And you need a decent number of captains and FO's to sit around doing nothing on reserve (ie not getting closer to 1000 hours). You can make various assumptions, but more or less you need the average new hire to stay 4-5 years.
Current situation sounds like 50% annualized turnover, call that 66% turnover for captains. Flight hours will shrink to the captain supply. Captain supply will shrink to the sim/lca supply. And lca supply will shrink to the extent they bother to fill out an application anywhere else.
100% turnover in 24 months, as noted, is rapid progression to unemployment.