Originally Posted by
LAXtoDEN
Peak? No. I had a AA friend go through their seniority list last year. AA’s massive retirement wave starts right now. I was told spring of 2023 half their list retires in like 6 years.
Even if United grows a few thousand pilots it’s not close unless American shrunk their seniority list from 15,000.
And yeah your counter is correct UAL has hired over 4,000 pilots since the beginning of 2022.
Your numbers aren't quite right.
AA has about 5200 retirements between now (well, my data is about 10 days old) and the end of 2029. They peak in 2025-2026.
UA has about 3700 retirements during the same time. They peak in 2028-2031.
That 1500 person gap slowly dwindles after that, since AA's list is older than UA's.
Since the beginning of 2022, UA has hired around 3500 pilots. I don't have numbers for AA during that time.
Fundamentally, the interpretation of the seniority list depends entirely on how much you buy into United's insane growth plans. In a purely hypothetical scenario where United Next plays out the way upper management intends it to, that would equate to a fleet size increase of roughly 80%, just taking the firm orders into account. It wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to see 25K+ pilots on the seniority list. Between 2023-2025, factoring in retirements and stated growth plans, the current seniority list could grow by roughly 6000 pilots, which would put them well north of 20K in the next 2.5 years.
If somebody got hired at United right now at roughly 16500, your percentage could be anywhere between 95% if hiring stopped tomorrow and 50% by the end of the 2020s if UA grows to 25000 and they have 3700 retirements.
Please note that I'm not making any commentary about the likelihood of these plans happening (to their fullest). I can say definitively they won't happen if we don't get a new contract sometime soon. There are a lot of variables and unknowns that could affect these plans that have been talked about
ad nauseum here already. The investments United has made on aircraft and sims and the expansion going on around TK certainly give some credibility to the notion they're dead serious about it, but things can and do happen in this industry.
I'm not especially familiar with AA's growth plans, but I have a lot more confidence in United's ability to execute massive growth than I do in AA's right now. That's based on a combination of the fact that UA has already laid the groundwork for said growth and that AA will have to work a lot harder to offset their attrition given their bell curve peaks several years sooner, and I'm not remotely convinced there is a cohesive plan for much of anything up at Skyview.