Yes at the regional level there will almost always be a shortage of experienced pilots willing to work for low wages. Regionals will always and have always depended upon the inexperienced pilot who needs to break into the industry in order to work his or her way up. He or she is inexperienced, mostly young or this is a second career, uneducated to the ways of the industry and willing to do almost anything for their own personal gain. I don’t fault the 300TT guy; after all mainline has a history of hiring private pilots and paying for their IR/CPL’s. The push at mainline will clean house at the regionals and the regionals will clean house at the FLT schools and then it will be over. The next question is, since it is/will be harder for students to find the money to train and the fact that aviation enrollments have been steadily dropping every year since the 90’s, will there be enough CPL’s to back-fill the large number of pilots that will be headed from the regionals to the majors? That is if the push is as big as most are predicting.

As for the push that is going to happen, don’t forget that foreign carriers (Cathay, Emirates, China, etc) are also going to see an increase in retirees, maybe not to the tone of 35% but an increase none the less……………. and the US regionals will be one of their strongest sources for pilots. Time will tell but I do see a huge push starting to happen around 2011 and continuing through 2017/18 with a long…………a very LONG period of stagnation afterwards.