Originally Posted by
AerChungus
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.
How big is Spirit and Swift? You're acting like their pilot groups total 1/2 million people. According to APC, Swift has 230 pilots TOTAL. 3600 at Spirit, half of them probably don't even half their apps out (bankruptcy or otherwise). They aren't so big it's going to completlely shift hiring for any extended period of time.
Yeah sure, all else being equal they'll hire them over 300 hour RJ fo.
The biggest problem is they have less options because no one wants to drain their own feed. I get what you're saying though. But, it's not going to be their biggest barrier to entry.