Originally Posted by chrisreedrules

As for relative seniority, AA certainly has more retirements but I don’t know if they have the training capacity to cover those and grow at the same time. Both Delta and United are growing despite their retirements which offsets some of that a little bit. And given how good the work rules and potential for time off/quality of life is for a junior Delta pilot, I’d rather be at 70-80% in seat at Delta than 50% at AA.

AA age 65 retirements never exceed 870 in a given year. School house has already been shown to output roughly 2000 new hires per year, and we have another Airbus sim being installed in CLT and we spool up the PHX sims in the near future. Capacity and throughout will increase as long as the check pilots are able to play ball. The Humpty's napkin math covers the pilot shortage spread and it's obviously not in labor's collective favor.

Speaking of quality of life… Most still at the regionals don’t realize this but the schedules on the narrowbodies at mainline are FAR more fatiguing than the 3-4 legs /day at the regionals. The work rules are more important than the pay in my opinion because the flying is longer duty days and shorter overnights. As regionals continue their collapse I imagine it isn’t going to get better on the mainline narrowbodies any time soon.