Originally Posted by
pangolin
Seriously. Black and white thinking is rampant in this industry. You have a point but it’s not as extreme as you make it out to be. The regionals don’t need to upgrade EVERYONE. Every upgrade will generate more hours for those FOs. Just a few is enough to keep the ball rolling. A few more than that and we expand. The money hunt is over. Captains are not going to the LCCs. They are holding out for the majors.
Originally Posted by
Reader
The problem there is that you’re going up against math with wishful thinking.
There is, by regulation, a hard cap on how much flying can be done. The number of captains is dictating where the cap is set. You talk about keeping the ball rolling, but what you describe is an airline forced to continually shrink. That is, by definition, not sustainable.
A few more obviously doesn’t equate to expansion, it equates to reducing the rate of the shrinkage. You need some more to get back to even. Expansion? That takes even MORE
Yeah, Pangolin. THIS ^^^^
it’s not some personal vendetta against regionals, it’s strictly theory of constraints. Every CA you lose is 1000 less hours the FOs can fly the next year. Every FO that you lose takes his/her SIC hours with them and will not contribute AT ALL to future CA upgrades at the regional. Regionals are bleeding experience and increasingly coming up against the hard limit of 1000 hours to upgrade. Add more zero 121 time FOs in at the bottom and the situation only gets worse, not better, since the limited SIC hours available must now be used to IOE and consolidate these guys/gals that will then sit on reserve and not fly because the more senior people are lineholders.
Right now a lot of regionals are like leaky boats whose bilge pumps can’t keep up with the leak. Eventually those boats sink if nothing else changes (like a serious recession).There is no gray area about it.