Originally Posted by
FriendlyPilot
If you are hired at United today you will have 8,000 pilots junior to you in about 4 years. Can you say the same at the airline you are at? We are replacing 400 RJs with mainline planes. These planes are on order, and even in a recession, which we are now, we are still taking the planes. Nobody at a ULCC really knows what airline they will be at in 5 years. Maybe Frontier buys JB etc? Not sure that JB (market cap $2.2B) paying $3.8B cash to buy Spirit with a market cap of $2.1B was a smart move, especially since they are not profitable right now. Also your ULCC base could change, as some of the ULCCs have been pulling back flying because of a lack of pilots.
Its going to get worse over the next 4 years. I think the ULCC model will fail as the big 4 get much bigger.
I think this is fairly bear-ish on the LCC model. Given the growing gap between the upper and lower-middle class, I think there will certainly be a place for their fares and cost structure. That said, from a employee perspective, there is definitely less stability as their model is not based on anchoring/maintaining fortress hubs for cost advantage.
If you’re in the top 15% and have less than 15 years to go, the switch probably doesn’t make sense. But if you have a longer career ahead of you, have not broken into that top-tier schedules, and/or live in a major united domicile, I think it’s worth the gamble.