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I agree it's a red herring, for the most part. There is a shortage of pilots, but pilots are not born pilots, nor are they forged in supernovas billions of years ago. They are trained. It's a simple calculus to pay enough to balance out the cost benefit equation that young potential pilots, and balance it well enough to keep the pipeline of new pilots mostly full.

There's often been a saying: there's not a shortage of pilots, there's a shortage of willing pilots. I consider a high school or college student who is considering a career as a pilot to be a "potential willing pilot."

I also agree the tangible costs of attrition are, at least at face value, not so high as to warrant a mega contract at face value. However, there are intangible, or at least less tangible costs associated with attrition, mostly because you can't vet, interview, hire, and train a pilot overnight, and you can't necessarily anticipate an attrition schedule.

So what higher cost is the company willing to carry in order to not give us what we want in the name of pilot attrition or a shortage? They have to be willing to essentially carry the cost of entire training pipeline along it's entire timeline from start to finish in order to not be "understaffed" during attrition waves. So if we can acquire a pilot from application to oe in 4 months, the total cost of a pilot is the entire training/acquisition cost of each pilot along with the cost of each pilot(only minimally offset by revenue generation during that period since they're an overstaffing solution) in order to prevent cancellations due to understaffing.

So if we're losing 200 pilots a year (2% attrition, so very low), the total cost of that is actually much higher than what one might expect because we don't know when they're going to quit. So it's the cost of training/acquiring 200 pilots plus the cost of caring 200 pilots of overstaffing in preparation for 200 pilots to quit unexpectedly.

So yes, not as significant as some might want to attribute to pure shortage reasons, but still around the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year per percentage of attrition. I did the rough math of $150k in cost to carry a pilot and 100 training events at $75k each for a wag, at it works out to around $22m per percentage of attrition, and that's overstaffing matching attrition perfectly.