Originally Posted by
DoSomePilotStuf
I’ve heard a rumor that United already has a 175 pay scale in the contract. Maybe no truth to it. And by the way, Mesa is flying 175s to the desert on a weekly basis. So while there are plenty of reasons not to bring them in house, it’s got to be expensive to have those planes, the newest 175s in United’s fleet, sitting mothballed.
It's a tradeoff between maintaining regional service during a pilot shortage, and the economic tipping point of RJ operations. Tradition says that unions are loathe to have ANY captain scale lower than ANY first officer scale, so in most shops the 175 CA scale would need to be $1 more than 777/350 FO scales. That's what hurts the business case. They could pay 175 FO's $30/hr if they're willing to hire CFI's for that.
If they can make the 175's work economically in-house, then they're likely to do so in the near future (50-seaters, no way). That doesn't mean they'll buy and SLI a regional... more likely they'd buy/lease the assets and hire the pilots. They could give preferential hiring to people already qualified in type, but then you have the street captain / seniority friction. More likely they'd make some deal with the union to allow them to hire 175 pilots who would get a short training course (basically indoc, FOM stuff) and would be seat-locked on type for a while.
If 175's don't work economically, they might still do it at a loss for a while just to maintain their regional network. In that case they would eventually transition RJ's back to outsourced FFD operators... just because you have RJ payscales at mainline, doesn't mean that you have to bring all RJ's in house, or keep them in house. As long as scope allowances still exist, the RJ's can always go back where they came from when the time is right.
A major *could* actually in theory buy and SLI an RJ pilot group. As mentioned, MB would prevent a staple but a major could just allow an SLI... the mainline pilots would be apoplectic of course but nothing they can really do. Scope clauses that I'm aware of protect the mainline group from getting screwed, but they don't allow them to screw another pilot group (again MB would prevail on that anyway). But the problem here is that your newly integrated senior RJ pilots would want to use their windfall seniority to bid a bigger airplane so more training churn. Maybe fence off all mainline planes for five years.
I think the more likely scenario is RJ pilots hired under a provision that would seat lock them into the 175 for a while. Depending on the CBA, they might or might not need union concurrence to assign "new hires" to a specific airplane with a seat lock.