Originally Posted by AerChungus

I don't think we will ever see the return of minimum wage pay. But with the next significant economic downturn, I would expect to see rates go back down. If I were to take a guess, probably back towards the $50-$60/hr range for new hire FOs.

There has been a practically endless supply of 1500 hour pilots desperate to fill the right seat ever since the AA wholly-owneds were the first to slow hiring in summer of 2022. The issue has never been this; the issue is getting those pilots to stay and upgrade. For now, there is still just enough leverage on the captain side that regionals need to try to retain what few bodies they have in the left seat. Since DECs haven't been a sustainable staffing solution since anybody who wanted to make the jump from 91/135/extended-period-of-not-flying has already come and gone to a major, regionals are forced to stay just competitive enough that some people will consider upgrading. At my old regional, the only ones who would really upgrade were the lifers, the people with some legal/checkride/financial skeletons in their closet, flow die-hards, Australians, and people who lived a 2-3 hour drive from our base, couldn't really drive anywhere closer, and the only other airline with a base in that city was the mainline. Everybody who didn't really fall into one of those buckets (at my regional, at least), was out as soon as they got a call from somewhere else, either before upgrade (if Frontier, Spirit, or JetBlue) or just out of upgrade (for legacies, if they didn't call even sooner).

This stream of CA upgrades is barely enough as it is, but now Spirit, Alaska, United, FedEx, UPS, and Southwest are either not hiring or not running classes while JetBlue, Frontier, Hawaiian, Delta, and American are running fewer classes than they have in the past few years. Now a lot of regional FOs and junior captains aren't able to leave their regional because there aren't enough jobs to go around and they are largely being outcompeted by Spirit pilots fearing bankruptcy and iAero pilots who just lost their jobs. 350 hours as an FO on an Embraer just isn't gonna cut it anymore when you're competing against people with 5000 hours and some PIC time on the 320 and 737. So ultimately, the leverage is going to fade, especially as the backlog of people unable to escape the regionals starts piling up in the left seat. And though there are still a good amount of retirements on the way, namely at American and United, I just don't see demand for pilots ever going back to what it once was.

So next time there is a downturn, I would expect the legacies to start the whipsaw again as we hit the low point of the cycle in this industry. We saw it happen most recently with CommuteAir and ExpressJet and I wouldn't be surprised to see American decline to renew their pay raises with their WOs, for United to try to whipsaw Mesa, CommuteAir, and GoJet against each other, and for Delta to maybe even try to see if they can get Republic and Skywest to butt heads. All the while, a lot of the "borrowed" flying that mainlines are doing in house, e.g. SLC-STL, will get farmed back out to the 175s as scope clauses allow. Why? Because as others said, they will pay regional pilots as little as they can. And when the supply and demand curve is reversed, they will look to drive costs down all over again. This is the whole reason they kept the regionals afloat for the past 3 years, so that they could wait until the hiring environment stabilized and then bring things back to the status quo. It was cheaper than letting them fail and permanently have mainline do the flying in-house. It's the very definition of the business model; do mainline flying for the same revenue at a lower operating expense.

At least that's what's written on my tin foil hat