Originally Posted by
310skying
Seems like it got lost in the merger craziness, but more alignment between F9 and NK. NK joins the 1500 hour club with their “Spirt Direct” program with ATP, while F9 has been doing this with Purdue for a while. Legacies might be sucking up all the ULCC pilots but the ULCCs aren’t going to leave anything for the regionals. Looks like the race for flight school partnerships is on, I give regionals 12-18months left.
Regionals seem to be like a collapsing soap bubble. They are losing so many CAs that they won’t be able to fly enough to give the FOs enough experience to become CAs. Just look at the bonuses some regionals are offering for DECs and near 1000 121 hour near-DECs. There are going to be a lot of quasi-experienced regional FOs starting over at the bottom of the seniority list at another airline soon when their regional folds. If it were me I’d damn sure rather it was NK or F9 rather than another regional where I’d be worrying about repeating the process when their CAs all got hired away too.