Originally Posted by
hindsight2020
Capacity constriction and scope relaxation = less than one-for-one attrition replacement. Your retirement wave is DOA. Many won't listen and will continue to become statistics.
If your dream is a perma regional CA, with all that regional flying entails QOL-wise, and never making over 100K, there will be a job for you. If you are looking at the guys retiring right now, forget it, that's gone. If you think there's going to be a slide-in replacement of folks to these jobs in the next 3 decades, you're fooling yourself. It's your journey though; I'm running full steam ahead, AWAY from the terminal (i.e. working for money, and flying for fun). Good luck, we're all counting on ya.
Yes, this is one of my concerns as well w/ the regional expansion that has occurred. The other issue is that a retirement wave at the majors does not equal hiring opportunities there. I could just as easily see the larger carriers shrinking as the retirements occur, which would stifle most job opportunites there.
RickAir mentioned quanitity of oil in this earth. This planet will always have a crap-ton of oil. That will never be an issue. The bigger issue is that w/ 7 billion people on the planet, we can't extract/produce oil quick enough to match demand during periods of global economic expansion/growth.