Uhh, you answered your own question. The secret is getting a bachelors degree. It's like the modern equivalent of a high school diploma.

You can do it online and you don't even have to learn anything useful if you don't want to.

I attended a real brick and mortar university in person and I still didn’t learn anything useful. :D

But you check the box .... and besides what some people want it to mean or what it may actually really be worth, it does satisfy a basic requirement for a lot of jobs

My degree was a 5 yr professional engineering degree. I coulda (and did) have a good career in the engineering world. Now, no one would ever call me back after being out of the profession and 20 years later with no real world experience in the game.. oh well, I proved I could complete a degree and graduate from the basic program and it opened up basic requirement doors to where I am now. Is it useless? I don’t know honestly. But it’s a game and if you don’t wanna play by the game rules, you then might suffer the consequences. No judgement. Just know what it is and for a lot of jobs it’s the price of a call.

I think he meant when they were hiring ink wet commercial guys.... not ATP’s

I learned about not falling for the “follow your girlfriend around after college” scam. That was a close one! Worth every penny.

Um.... mainline AA does not stop training on Thanksgiving or Christmas (neither INDOC or ground/sim training). Ask me how I know.

Flowing in a few months. I have 10,000 hrs 121, over 4,000 PIC, and LCA. I'd say the flows have just as much if not more experience than the average Delta or United civilian new hire. Some us of waited to flow to AA instead going somewhere else. Hasn't Delta hired quite a few non-military pilots without any 121 PIC time? You at least have to be a captain (as of now) to flow to AA.

You’ve got more time than me and I’ve been here 12 years haha

I didn't have that kind of time when I came over. 5k tt 3.5k 121pic. From PSA/pdt that's probably a closer guess

I was about 4K to and 1.5k TPIC when hired at Airways. No clue what my tt is now but on my last medical I think I put 9500 :confused: A lot of the new hire FOs I fly with have quite a bit more time than me

The Envoy flows are probably higher time. One I know flowed earlier this year with 22,000 hours. Good guy and great pilot.


I'm sure there are others.

Holy cow. That's a chunk of time.

The hardest thing to learn has been the AA way of doing things like Dallas and ORD. I seriously doubt there's people coming over via the flow with very little experience.

I’ll have over 6,000 total and almost 3,000 TPIC when I flow. I’d say most flows are well-qualified.

Delta has fired many 9E pilots? Can you put a number on that. My understanding is 3 total.

Regional counting skills:
1 : one
2 : more
3 : lots
....
4 : profit

Kind of enjoy the other side of the scale as well. One of the 190 forced upgrades was the #1 fo at regional. loved the schedule and didn’t need the money. he had 0 121TPIC as is a mainline capt. I only had logged 19 hours my last 24 months at regional. Another guy who was hired into the training dept at regional tried to be the lowest hourly pilot at AA. unfortunately, he was beat out by some mil guys. but as far as 121 time I think he was low at less than 3k. not bad for a flow. Goal is work as little as possible right? Way I looked at it is there are no ASAPs in sim world. I was master level at TEM.

Scared of your own shadow?

I don’t think the knock is against their stats. It’s the “I can’t make it to the majors the normal way” enriched hiring pool and “i can make it to the majors the normal way” depleted flow stream that people object to

Do you have specific examples?

I can't speak for PSA or Piedmont flows, but I do know Envoy is quick to fire just about anyone for anything.

PSA has been on a roll for firing people and putting letters in v files for years. That being said I don't know about most people but I busted my ass to get hired at FedEx, United, Delta and to a lesser extent UPS. Nobody called before I flowed. That's just the way the cookie crumbled, I'm sure there's folks who aren't trying to get hired though.

I know a lot of great pilots who have flowed to AA and didn’t go somewhere else first. Not for lack of trying though...

This isn’t a knock against anyone who flows.

But how many people flow after being hired by another major?

There are two possibilities here

1) the WO folks hired by DL UA SW etc are a randomly selected group indistinguishable from those who aren’t hired

2) that group is above average. Leaving behind a group that’s below average.

Or maybe a lot of the flows want to be at AA instead of United or Delta, so they don’t even try to get hired elsewhere because they already have a flow to their 1st choice.

As an Envoy flow I can tell you that a lot of guys I spoke with the last couple years have been waiting for AA, mainly for the retirement numbers and given the average age of a new hire at AA was high 30s/low 40s compared with the fact that both UA and DL have already hired 5000ish guys in 7 years with a much lower average age...much better movement plus DFW for those that want it.

As far as the bottom half of the list, those guys we’re asking how to get picked up at any major quickest.

Sounds like a few people are trying desperately to pretend that raw milk put through a cream separator will yield half and half from both spigots.

That isn’t my experience.

I've been very critical of those that simply depend on flow to get them to a major.

That said, if you need a regional to get PIC to make your apps competitive, by the time you are competitive, you're pretty close to flowing. If AA is your preferred destination, at the point you're close to flowing, you probably aren't trying to get hired by Delta, United, FedEx, UPS, Southwest and you sure as hell are not trying to get hired by Agilent, Frontier, Sun Country, etc.

There are a LOT of people I've flown with that fit that description.

But to the point of the thread, there are quite few I've flown with that would never get hired at a legacy without the flow (no degree being the biggest thing)... I think most of those would still land at a major though if it weren't for flow given the future retirement situation.

I don’t think it would hurt to have a barrier or two added to the flow. Like a training record review or a look at a personnel file. Probably way past time to go back and change that process...

Anyway, toward the end of my stint on the 190 a captain told me the following story: He had been hired by Airways from Mesaba. When he was at Mesaba a captain there had been, allegedly, drugging and sexually assaulting flight attendants. Crazy story today, back then he was allowed to resign. Fast forward to this 190 CA showing up at the CLT training center for an R9 and guess who’s strolling around... the guy now works for PSA and gets to walk in the door at AA.

The flow serves its purpose in many ways. It alleviates the pressure on HR to interview and hire an enormous amount of pilots and acts as a recruiting tool for the wholly owned regionals. If it was causing a giant headache for AA they would change it.

I'm sure there are avenues for bad people via the flow, but I'm guessing most people aren't like that.

In regards to the PSA flow, AA has always been able refuse people. To my knowledge they haven't exercised that ability yet.

Many of you are acting as if getting hired instead of flowing has any bearing on whether or not a pilot will be a desirable person to work with. And many of you are insinuating that a person who chooses to flow to AA rather than go somewhere else is a less desirable employee. That’s absurd.

Sure there will always be a few bad apples. But plenty of pilots hired at AA, UA, and Delta outside of the flow and interview agreements have been bad apple employees. It’s just the way it is.

Again, Can't speak for PSA or PDT, but Envoy has some of the strictest hiring standards amongst regionals right now.

There were people hired at Airways in the 80's/90's who would not get hired under Envoy's standards today. One current 777 F/O I know of specifically with an egregious accident/incident record.

It's also important to remember this isn't yesterdays AMR. Even off the street AA's interview is by far the easiest amongst the Big 3, and easier than Southwest/Fedex. It's like a 90% acceptance rate. Higher than Envoy/PSA/PDT if we're being honest.

This is already in place at Envoy in the next flow agreement, after the protected pilots finishing flowing.

A very large portion don’t apply anywhere. Seriously. It’s dumb but it’s what they do. Can’t say they were put through the “cream separator” and came out on the skim side if they weren’t rejected at any point.

It’s very hard just to get an interview at AA. That’s the big hurdle here, compared to UAL and DAL. They only call you in if they believe they want you to be a pilot here. The high acceptance rate doesn’t make it comparable to a regional by any means whatsoever. That’s an absurd analogy.

AA is interviewing the same candidates as DL/UA/FX and has by far the highest acceptance rate. What's absurd about that?

AA has the Organizational Fit Assessment and the video interview before you even get to DFW. UAL has the Hogan, DAL and FDX don't have any pre-screening (that I am aware of, feel free to correct me).

I'd say AA has a pretty good feel of a candidate before they step foot into the interview, more so than some other carriers.

If they had both of those processes in place, and had a high interview failure rate, that would indicate a problem with the process, not the candidates.

The whole point of pre-screening these days in all different industries is to not waste your time interviewing someone who you're going to just end up turning down.

If you have a high pass rate and the person being hired ends up being who you're looking for, what's the problem with the process?

AA seems, as others have said, to use the final face to face as the last check to validate the screening process that has brought a candidate they really want to hire to the final gate. The recommendation letters are a big part of the initial process. And, almost everyone who gets the face to face is most likely military, a group AA literally bends over backwards to procure to mix into the flows. These military pilots are pretty much a known entity, homogenous, and proven to have passed the test. So, they do get hired at a high percentage because of the earlier gates they cleared.

Perhaps that’s right now. Hasn’t always been the case. During an interview prep course a quote that was shared from an Eagle recruiter, “Our fingernails are bleeding from scraping the bottom of the barrel”

And I believe it. The 1500 hour rule hit the regional airlines hard and qualified candidates were hard to come by. FOs were taking 80 hours to complete OE and even then the regular line captains were left to teach... A LOT.

Anyway. Happy to hear it has gotten better (at least at Envoy)

Jumping back... if AA had a problem, they would change it. If the rumor of 10+ probationary pilots being fired last year is true, then the bad apples make themselves known and the current system works just fine.

My qualm was with you comparing our interview process with Piedmont, Envoy and PSA.

What’s the “normal” way?
Your Daddy at mainline finances your college/flight training. He walks your resume into the CP office and at 2000 hours your “hired”. (And by YOU I mean a Son/daughter of an Airline Pilot)

Vs

A regular guy off the street. Flys 10,000 hours all over the northeast. Doesn’t have the golden ladder available to him. Waits his 10-14 years to flow. Now he gets to fly all over the northeast. But at a Mainline pay scale.

People are people. I’d like to think once you get to the mainline level everyone has the equal amount of talent to fly a jet from A to B.
There were people hired outside the flow that were, well let’s say, on thin ice before.

The flow allows people to be put into a group. Then the group analyzed. Then segregation. Then Generalizations. Just as this thread has become.