Originally Posted by forgot to bid

I hear ya Mason. The regionals used to be a place to build time and then progress up. The problem is someone got it in their heads on the mainline side of the equation (not DAL but all mainline) that pay for training ($7K for Beech 1900 or $10K for EMB-120) for a job that paid $12K a year was justifiable because those guys were paying their dues just like the military guys paid theirs. Big mistake.

Because the pay never came up but technology sure got smaller and smaller and soon those commuters had turbofans attached to remakes of their turboprops (120) for those "paying their dues" wages (Coex paid I think in the $20s/hr for ERJ-145 CA when those came out in 1997) and immediately every legacy carrier the opportunity to provide not only jet service but high frequency jet service on routes that did not exist before. Not to mention that the paying their dues attitude doesn't work either, these pilots are paying $50-$70K for training these days and F-16s aren't going to replace DC9s, but that'd be cool, and so we've got to stop treating them as a training ground.

I look at a route like ATL-PHF, 8 DCI flights and about 480 seats per day. Thats probably all the demand that route will hold with the stiff competition from AirTran, who started the route, and provides 4 of their 717s, we provide double. On a flight by flight comparison the revenue per seat mile - the RJs pitiful cost per seat mile might not be great but as a whole that route might have really good margin because of its frequency, better than 3 MD88s per day that wouldn't have provided that extra frequency benefit.

I am making this up as I go. Can you tell? All I am saying is we got ourselves in this position as a pilot group and we're going to have to get creative to get out of it.