Originally Posted by
cornerpocket
I don't know how many people are sticking around OO just for mainline. Sure, mainline is all the new hires talk about. But it seems like those with a little more experience under their belt understand the hiring music will stop at some point and LCC's offer significantly more earning potential than OO. OO is still losing a lot of pilots to the LCC's. IMO, not having a flow is hurting more than it's helping.
There has been talk about flows to mainline "in the works" at OO, but the consensus seems to be that it's all talk and just a tactic to get people to stay until mainline/LCC hiring stops. Time will tell.
For those majors that depend on regional feed, keeping regional people at the regional as long as possible is absolutely necessary. Any pilot who leaves the regional having less than 1000 TPIC has consumed more regional SIC hours than they have generated and FOs leaving for other airlines will take their SIC hours of experience without having generated a single hour themselves. Hence, the 1600 hour PIC requirement and mandatory upgrades.
Contrarywise, anybody they can hire from their competitors - be it a ULCC or the other airlines currently bleeding FOs and junior CAs to the Big Three - is all to the good.
Now I get it. A lot of people don’t WANT to upgrade, or at least don’t want to upgrade until they have so much FO time and seniority that they will not worry about the training event or being the junior CA getting all the cr@p schedules. And what they’d like is to just not ever be junior (or risk an ‘unnecessary’ training event until they have a CJO from their career major. I mean, who WOULDN’T want that? And some would just prefer to hang out as a senior FO, so they can write their own schedule that’s compatible with your side gig, because you enjoy flying as a sort of hobby someone pays you to do. I get that too.
But the regional model isn’t viable if regional management doesn’t get more people to upgrade and stay longer - it’s as simple as that - and the Big Three who use those regionals to provide that feed are going to do their best to help their regionals keep people at their regionals (although they may poach people from the OTHER Big Two’s regional) to make that happen. So right now the fastest course to be considered by the Big Three seems to be get your ATP and a year of flying at a regional and then jump to an LCC/ULCC which has plenty of FO flying because it has a viable CA wage scale (even NK tops out at over $300 an hour plus DC) where you can QUICKLY accumulate flight hours in a 320/737 aircraft and where the Big Three will be hurting a competitor - not their own feed - when they hire you.