Originally Posted by
Boomer
Stating the obvious, the number of upgrades will roughly equal the amount of Captains that leave.
Lets say all the majors (combined) hire 20 CommutAir pilots and 300 Xjet/ASA pilots a year.
In 5 years the bottom guy at CommutAir has moved up to number 50 and is already logging PIC. The bottom guy at XJet is only number 2700 and still roughly two years from upgrade.
So you have to ask... is 20/year a reasonable number for Commutair attrition? Is 300/year a reasonable number for XJet attrition?
Looking at it a different way - if Commutair wins flying and adds 10 aircraft, almost everyone on the list gets to upgrade.
If XJet gets 10 aircraft, less than 3% of the first officers upgrade.
It's all luck anyway, but that's how I would be looking at it if my goal was to get to a major.
I doubt xjet will have 300 a year leave more like 100. But the rest of your post is spot on.
XJT and asa are going to merge into the biggest regional out there and the larger an airline the harder it is to get an upgrade. One is that they will have more lifers than any airline our there minus the majors. Two is that they will have over 400 fifty seaters and will be the number 1 target for cuts. Someone said they have a contract with united for 10 years. You know what that doesn't mean crap. Look at the past 3 years when airlines furloughed by the hundreds. They didn't park a single airplane their cuts where in the terms of block hours.
The average aircraft flys around 8 or 9 hours a day. Delta can and probably will cut that down to 5 or 6 hours a day come this fall so asa will be overstaffed and if oil stays high then united will start to cut as well and they will cut 3 hours or so per a/c. Pretty soon 20% of your block hours are gone and then you go from flying 90 hours a month and getting called on your days off to getting 80 hours and being told to take vacation. Asa and XJT are the next comair/mesa.
Go to colgan they are gonna grow like crazy. When united and delta park asa and xjts 50 seaters they will replace them with colgan saabs and q400s. The new pinnacle is gonna be where its at. They have something like 60 crj 900s! and 30 q400s!