Originally Posted by
Sliceback
For the group as a whole percentages matter. What major airline pilots corps has grown 20% recently? That would be like the Big 3 hiring 3,000 pilots a year right now. The growth is big numbers, requires a lot of simulators, staff, hardware, etc, but it's a smaller impact than the growth of the 1980's. The airlines doubled in size in a decade. That's like the 10-12,000 pilot corps of 2014 have 20-24,000 pilots today. They're at 16,000. Having 1,000 guys junior to you in a 5,000 pilot airline is 20%. That's great protection. Having 1,000 below you in a 16,000 pilot airline is 6%. The saving grace in that is you can count the future 1-2 years of retirements as 'furloughs' and suddenly the 1,000 becomes 2,500 +/- which is approx. 15%. Historically minimum furloughs tended to be about 5% and big furloughs were around 15%.
But by the same token, multi type fleets make it more difficult to furlough.
In a single type fleet like WN or AS, it's pretty straightforward. you can just trim at the bottom. Yeah, you may need to displace a few CAs but they are going back to the other seat in an aircraft they are currently flying, not to a different type altogether. Multi type fleets have sort of a domino effect. You wind up switching types and perhaps bases even for the people you keep with the resultant delays, training demands and training costs. Especially at the top (WB) payscale aircraft where you might have three FOs per CA, with at least two of them senior to many of the NB CAs.
You incur huge training costs in the downgrades while keeping your most expensive pilots. Even if you wind up getting all your junior pilots back (and you won't) it doesn't save you anywhere near the average salary per pilot. And that's even more the case for UA where upgrades are being given in intro. How many aircraft do you park trying to fill all the junior CA vacancies. How much does it cost you in displacements to do it? In many cases it'll be far cheaper to just give senior people VIL or early retirement.
And as you mentioned - retirements. Those don't peak for UA until 2027 and stay up in the 600s for 3 years after that. So yeah, nobody wants a black swan event to occur, but barring Greta Thunberg becoming Empress of the World, I think the new hires are going to do OK.