Originally Posted by
TFAYD
What is worse is that Chip doesn’t have a plan.
I encourage everyone to listen to the last earnings call recording. Chip is basically insinuating that hiring at the majors may slow a bit and that the new pay package is working as intended. Maybe he feels bullish after the Jan Gone Report showed a net gain of 35 pilots vs a net loss of of ~1000 pilots in 2022.
And yes, the CA/FO remains unchanged. The entire operation is just shrinking.
30 percent of the ERJ fleet is sitting idle and more than 40 percent of the CRJ fleet is not productive. These are some very sobering numbers.
They could come up with plenty of career advancement opportunities to settle CA attrition down but they can’t give up the idea of connecting the world with 4 separate legacy partners. You can’t set up a flow program with Delta and think United’s going to be happy about that and do business with you in the future. They called it “lowering overall risk” in the earnings transcript but it’s not lowering anything, just killing their entire business. Chip is legitimately running SkyWest into the ground with that business plan. It also sounds like AA is pulling the same move they did with Mesa and not matching the new pilot pay scales. Nice lil $60 million loss for St. George.
What’s worse is Chip basically said their only solution is to beg United/Delta to stop hiring their Captain’s or they won’t be able to meet their contract obligations. The result, OO Captains sniff that out when they see less qualified candidates being picked off at destination airlines, especially United atm, and they just apply everywhere and focus more on leaving SkyWest at any cost.