The high time lines are going to be here for awhile.
The company built the hiring plan to acheive the staffing necessary to fly the planned schedule as they always do. However, that schedule resulted in a hiring plan like we have never seen before. The good news is the intake point of the hiring process was relatively easy to adjust to accomodate the numbers needed. You can still get plenty of folks to interview and hire, albeit some with less experience than we have seen in the past, but still plenty of good quality folks to welcome aboard.

The bad news is pilots that have completed basic indoc are not ready to fly UA jets and the other choke points in training were not as easy to expand to the new required capacity. At this point it appears that the primary limiting factor is OE and the number of LCAs, though I think PI stafiing is not far behind in the contest for most limiting choke point.

So, you have not enough LCAs to do the work coupled with less experienced folks coming in the door that sometimes need more OE than we gave in the past. That means longer and longer wait times for starting/completing OE. Since the ocntract is specific on how many days the company gets as OE blocker days in your schedule, this backlog in OE has created a problem that was being masked initially in PBS. You were getting a good number of folks that were getting a line or reserve PBS requirement that made the solution look good on paper for staffing, but was really just smoke and mirrors. The actual result was a bunch of folks showing in PBS as being available when in fact they were not going to be complete with OE anywhere near the end of their OE blocked days. So, all the reserve coverage or trip coverage that their line showed after the OE blocker days was really not covered at all. The company realized this over the last few months and started pumping up the Line Values across most of the fleets so that reserve staffing would "increase" and whatever the fallout was from incomplete OEs could be more easily covered.

The problem is that I don't see much changing with this problem in the short term as the same analysis that resulted in our current staffing issue is the analysis that was used for the summer and the flying is going to be on a steady increase for the coming months. The return of the PW powered 777s might help, but I believe the use of those aircraft was baked into the plan previously, so not sure if it is really going to help that much.

Couple all this with the staffing crisis at the regionals and the pressure that is going to bring on mainline picking up flying even faster and I don't see an end to the 90 hour lines for a long while!