Originally Posted by
TOGALOCK
I’m certainly not saying that having only 10 new hires is okay, but in Indigo’s eyes the sky isn’t falling yet. In the Q3 earnings report BB was asked point blank about future pilot staffing and what it meant for summer flying (or something to that effect). BB stated that we are currently staffed to meet our summer 2022 demand. Being public now, he has a lot less wiggle room to BS an answer when directly asked.
Also, if we’re going off the typical staffing target of 15 pilots per plane, we’re currently staffed to properly handle 113 airplanes. We’re not even there yet and I don’t believe we were slated to receive any aircraft Q2 of this year. We’re definitely going to have a problem in the future, but that’s tomorrow’s problem. Indigo is very good (unfortunately) at walking a very fine line with finances and staffing. They’ll throw fixes and money at the problem when they feel they’ve hit a wall and it begins to impact the operation. We will become short staffed on pilots and they will fix it with lots in the PAF and flying the reserves to the max. Only once it becomes apparent to them that is no longer enough will we see any appreciable change.
I may be wrong, but we are planning on receiving the following:
March - 1 x A320
April - 2 x A320's
June - 2 x A320's
July - 2 x A320's
August - 1 x A320
October - 4 x A321's
November - 3 x A321's
December - 2 x A321's
Received N388FR (A320) on January 20th. So that's a total of 18 for 2022. We should have 124 by the end of the year after 4 are returned. To staff those 124 we are looking at approximately 1860 pilots. As of January, we had 1708 pilots. We only need another 152 pilots by the end of the year, or 12-13 pilots a month. This does not account for attrition.