With the Legacy carriers, LCCs, etc… slowing or stopping hiring, the sucking chest wound of regional captain staffing will probably start to close up. I personally have three friends at the regionals who tried like heck to get out as first officers but were unsuccessful. They’ve all now shifted their focus to upgrading at their regional. I imagine they aren’t alone and we’ll see many regionals stabilize their captain staffing a bit which could in turn open up more demand for FOs again.

It’s also no secret that many regionals have had aircraft parked during this post covid hiring tsunami. While the big three have certainly tried to reduce their dependence on regional flying (a good thing overall), it’s still very important to feed traffic from small and medium markets to their hubs, so I imagine they’d love to get many of these parked aircraft back flying again.

With all this in mind, is it possible we’re going to see some more steady regional FO hiring return as current FOs upgrade and parked jets potentially come back online?