The Navy alone commissions 1000 pilots a year. 2500 getting out a year amongst all the services (Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard) is entirely believable.

 

Is that the navy or naval training? That may include marines and CG.

 

The AF loses approx 1200 pilots per year to retirements and separations. (Data directly from the flesh-peddler at AFPC). Figure Navy/USMC about 1,000? However, 60% of all Navy pilots are RW.

Not all of these fine Americans will come to mainline or even want to fly. Many haven't been actively flying or stuck in a staff job for a few years. They may have to hit the RJs for a couple years.

Bottom line, if even 75% of all Mil pilots per year (say 1100) want to fly mainline, AA needs that many pilots in 2022-2026 each year by themselves, not to mention the rest of the Big 4 and Cargo 2.

And this doesn't account for any potential "Stop Loss" the AF may apply in the future.

Historic times for airline pilots.

 

I am hopeful that OTS civilian only trained hiring stats go up. We are projecting to hire 730 total pilots in 2018. As retirements continue to accelerate, the largest available sector of qualified applicants will come from the civilian only trained side of the fence. I don’t like that term anyhow. Most of the OTSCOT (new term I just made up) success stories I read about have a common theme. An individual who networked, constantly updated and kept improving their resume with different qualifications or education. Also, I think AA is facing a problem of training capacity, lack of new pilots/new Captains to fill in the gaps from the flows from the WO’s and we are changing some contractual items that have management trying to “right size” the pilot numbers. All of this doesn’t change the simple fact that we are beginning to see a retirement wave that is unprecedented....

CD9

 

Looked at DL hiring stats - both years showed 47% military.
One year of UA hiring stats - 37% military.

Early 80’s it was 90%.

Industry wide dropped below 50% for the first time back in the late 1990’s.

2023 Big 8 (Big 4 + FX, UPS, JB, AK) will retire 3,000.

 

1/3 of those are AA alone.

 

On 03-01-2014 Ftrooppilot wrote:

“I believe it's a mistake to think that ALL separating or retiring military pilots want to fly for the airlines - especially those retiring who have probably been in staff/management positions for ten years. When I retired it was a choice of JR FO at a major airline or a management position paying twice what I made in the USAF. No contest plus I was home every night.

The military (USAF/USN joint programs) train about 1200 pilots a year and I expect that to decrease. Assuming 1200 leave the military each year and 1/3 of them have no desire to fly for the airlines, that leaves about 800 military pilots applying to the airlines. A certain portion of them will go cargo or executive.

... I Think when it all "settles down" there may be about 600-700 former military pilots available to the industry each year.“


That agrees with numbers I have seen recently with about 1,000 military hires into the big 6. Things may change in the future (just like former pilots that got furloughed and got out. A number of them are getting back in). It could be a higher percentage of military may decide to go the airline career than in the past, but we do not know.

One thing for certain, the military will be a minority of airline new hires during the coming decade. Current figures already bear that out and we have not even hit the big wave of retirements. YMMV

 

Military has been a minority of major airline hiring since the late 1990’s. The percentage will decrease in the years ahead.

 

Last time I checked, Navy only. PERS-43 puts out the accession info yearly at as part of the community briefs.

 

Spot On, Slice.

The original question posed was, “Is AA really serious about this 40% military thing?” (40% of all hires being military.)

My point is there are not enough coming out of the military to go around. I doubt AA will be able to achieve this in 2018 nor any year in the foreseeable future.

(Now military being 40% of the OTS hiring — not counting flows from WO, that might be more realistic. As hiring ramps up, OTS will ramp up. As military is a pretty fixed number, the increase in hiring predominately will come from OTS civilian.)