Originally Posted by FlyGuy2021

I think the furloughs from the other majors and cargo ops along with the military hires will cover the majority of the mainline hires for the next bit. Let's face it, if Delta/United/American/Southwest aren't making money with every seat full, there is no way that Spirit, JetBlue, or Frontier can survive in their current form. There will be thousands of pilots cut and dumped on the street for the legacies to pick up.

By the time that things really start going again, the output in the pilot training pipeline of student pilots will be nearly double what it is right now. The experienced regional pilots will start getting hired at the legacies again, but it will never be like it has for the last few years again.

Here's another thing for you - do you think that there will be any regionals a year from now that don't have a training contract that is enforcable? Massive loans disguised as training contracts that will be due if someone leaves? That will be the new industry standard going forward.

Regional signing bonuses are almost all gone now. The few remaining airlines that are offering them will be staffed in the next 6 months and all of those bonuses will be gone. Regionals will have much better qualified pilots to start hiring (previous 91k or 135 pilots) so those straight out of flight school with 1500 hours will have a hard time getting hired at a regional again.

Even when airbus and boeing start building airplanes quickly again, Delta and United will be start parking their older aircraft. United's fleet is ridiculously old right now and nearly 1/3 will be parked in the coming years. 250 of United's airplanes will be over 30 years old before their big retirement wave really starts to hit.