DAL 88 Driver

That's a complete distortion of what I've been saying. Regional pilots are some of the best qualified individuals to fly for a major airline. At my previous airline, I was a DC-9 instructor and trained new hires. In the end, the military and civilian guys both did very well. But it made my job a lot easier at the beginning of the training if I got a regional pilot to train. They've already been flying Part 121 mostly in the same airspace and environment as mainline.

What I have been clearly saying is that I don't think being a regional pilot automatically qualifies to be a major airline pilot. The hiring standards are lower (especially these days) and, with the career being worth basically HALF what it used to be worth, the profession cannot possibly be attracting the same caliber of people in general. I've already made this argument. You just want to skip past what I'm really saying and try to paint me as some mainline-pilot-snob-regional-pilot-hater. That couldn't be further from the truth! I just think it would be a huge mistake to give regional pilots a fast track to mainline without using an appropriate evaluation process to determine if the individual has the experience and the attributes to do the job to the high standards (including safety standards) this industry and its customers have come to expect. For the vast majority of today's regional pilots, that should be no problem at all... and I would fully expect to see many, many of them in our new hire classes, just like it has been for the past couple of decades.