BomberPlt

Congrats and good luck! What airframe(s) did you fly?

greenergrass

KC-10 and T-1

METARHIMS

I'm curious if anyone knows why Delta has a preference to hire military pilots?

Please, please, I don't want replies about why this is a good or bad idea, or why military pilots are better, civilian pilots are better, etc., just wondering if Delta has ever given an idea of why they prefer military pilots? No criticism or controversy.

From reading this thread it seems like Delta will even prefer a military pilot with a few imperfections (driving record, checkride history, etc.) over a cleaner civilian pilot, I'm sure Delta has their reasoning and I'm curious about it.

Thanks for the civilized replies!

CGfalconHerc

Prior to 99, DL was about 90% prior military and had a 20/20 vision requirement which excluded a lot of civilian applicants. I can't remember when they waived the vision and no-nepotism clause, but my class was 50/50 in 99 as DL saw the military pool drying up and wanted to hire RJ LCA's and experienced CA's who had flown complex TP 's like the Saab, ATR, BRO.

After 9/11, most mil pilots were back in the sandbox and were committed to a mil retirement, which resulted in a lot of very qualified civ pilots being hired 07-09 as the scale tipped back to the predominantly civilian pool.

Fast forward to today, many mil guys are getting the OTS invite to balance the civ flows from CZ and SSP's from 9E. I think DL's goal is a 50/50 balance for the hiring year..but that's is masked by OTS invites that seem to be favoring mil pilots over the short term.

Again, jmho, and as hiring across the industry accelerates over the next 3 yrs, I think you'll see a lot more civ OTS hires.

Good luck and hang in there,

Sputnik

Since they stayed hiring this round is holding at 45% mil.

Not sure what it is at other big carriers or how that compares historically. But I think delta could hire nothing but military if they wanted.

Don't sweat stuff you can't change. Just do the best you can to burnish your resume.

sailingfun

I posted some of this before so its a bit of a repeat. Delta does not really favor military pilots. They do however more so then other airlines place a lot of emphasis on the non flying portion of your resume. Most military guys have very strong non flying resumes. They generally graduated very high in their high school classes, performed well in college and have a large list of sports and other non academic activities. Once in the Military they generally get a lot of leadership training and serve in leadership positions. Most have supervised large groups of personal and many have managed multi million dollar budgets. A high percentage have a masters degree by the time they get out. They also have a large amount of experience in giving briefs and public speaking that is invaluble when interviewing.
I had a friend who was a civilian who did many of the interviews with Delta in the nineties. I asked him why more civilians were not getting hired. He said what I mentioned above and also said the military pilots did much better in the interviews. They showed up looking sharp and prepared. He had civilian pilots show up that had not had a recent hair cut, shoes not shined and suits 2 sizes to small. He even had one the week prior to talking with him walk into the interview room wearing sunglasses! He wanted to hire civlian pilots. He said the military guys were just far more impressive in the interview process. Some of the above may be changing with the advent of interview coaching services. They can help close the gap in the initial assessment of a candidate.
The last thing to mention about the Delta hiring process is that it has a lookback component. They watch how the new hires perform and try to correlate that with background. They then bias future hiring toward those groups with the best performance. All of the above does not take into account the differences in flight training. Military training is consistant and attrition oriented to an extant. Civilian training can be as good or better then military but can also be far worse. The airlines get a more consistant product from the military. That does not mean a civlian pilot can not perform better then most military pilots. They often do however the standard deviation is much larger.

Flycameron

Why is it, that I hear the military guys struggle with training more than a 121 guys does? My buddy that just went through said it was the military guys that had a hard time and in fact delta's operations were practically identical to that of the regional airline he came from. I could definitely see the military guys showing up prepared and looking sharp for an interview so that makes sense. It's the select few 121 guys that show up that seem to give us all a bad name but I can't imagine a military guy not showing up on time and looking sharp.

I know guys that have as a good as a resume as that of a military guy. He has the leadership and progression delta is looking for yet his military friend will always get the call before him. It would appear to me that most of the guys doing the screening are prior military guys and you know you always give preference to your friends.

The other problem is that most of the available Non military guys are coming from flow and SSP. This makes it look like only military guys are getting called. 49% are military and the other 40% are from flow so that only leaves 10% for guys OTS. I think this makes the numbers look really skewed toward the military since you only have 60% available for guys OTS and 40% are flow/SSP and the other 49% of those are military guys. So really it's almost a 50/50 split for hiring but of the 50% OTS guys, 40% of them are coming from flow/SSP. So most of the invites we hear about are going to military guys since the OTS offers are already taken by the flow/SSP guys. Hope that makes sense.

The only good news is that they can't hire military guys forever. I was told that of the 8,000 applications about 40% are military. I don't believe it's even that high but who really knows? So that is around 3,000 guys that are military. I'd like to think that those 3,000 guys also applied at American and united and southwest too. So if thats true and delta needs 1000 a year and American 500 and united 600 and southwest 400 then it should only take about a year until all the military guys are hired. The other good news is that the compass flows should be done pretty quickly next year since I think only 160 qualify for flow. It will only be a matter of time until the military and flow guys are no more.

Trip7

Apparently no true OTS hires have had any training failures. Word on the street is all training failures have been Compass flows or Endeavor SSP new hires

ShyGuy

Yikes. The DC9s are all gone so how does one fail a glass-to-glass transition.

MDPilot

It's all about attitude