preflight

Anyone know how the company will get this information?

PRIA, pull from Sabre, resumes, website form?

Curious what the justification was that a full time employee here for years gets less credit than a new hire OTS Captain with previous non ALPA time. Any ideas?

edv2021

The justification was probably that we got substantial concessions in return for permitting it, and the company desperately needs captains or this company will become a massive hole in the ground?

Hopefully it doesn’t work - then we get even more concessions. But life isn’t always fair.

Excargodog

You don’t want the company to get enough captains to continue operations? Because that’s what appears to be killing the regional model.

They are hiring so many CAs and senior FOs that they can’t keep enough CAs around long enough to get enough FOs upgrade eligible to replace the CAs they are losing. Ideally (from an optimal steady state career progression standpoint) every new hire would have a captain to fly with for 1000 hours and would promptly upgrade, fly another 1000 hours as a CA, and be off to the major at 2000 hr of 121 time. And back when 1000 TPIC was sort of the entry to eligibility for the majors, that was sort of the norm. The norm has changed.

Guys/gals are going to the majors with less than 1000 TPIC routinely, which means they weren’t a CA long enough to qualify a CA replacement. Worse yet (from a viability of the regional standpoint) people are going off to the ULCCs, ACMIs, and even to legacies with NO TPIC, meaning whatever SIC hours they have (which required the expenditure of an equal number of CA hours) they took with them and didn’t EVER make a contribution to maturing the next generation of CAs at the regional level. Right now most regionals are surviving by hiring DECs and depending on regional CAs that are sufficiently senior that they would NEVER recoup the loss in QOL and/or pay they would get by starting over, even at a major and/or are so dependent on living at a certain base that they literally can’t go to a major. But this group is going to age out of the system fairly quickly and except for DECs, there will be no one to replace them.

It’s an unstable dynamic, that is already starting to collapse as you see Skywest and others cutting back with EAS and other flying and it’s a problem you can’t make well by shoving wet ink certificate ATPs in at the bottom, only by upgrading guys/gals at 1000 hrs or, yeah, scrounging for more DECs.

But it’s a problem that must be solved to prevent regionals from becoming massive holes in the ground. And that’s important to the legacies that depend on the hub and spoke model. And the legacies are trying to fix it by recruiting their new hires from ULCCs and somebody else’s regional, while the ULCCs are handling their attrition by recruiting regional FOs and - ultimately - wet ink certificate ATPs.

Fair has little to do with it - it’s reality - although a 2-3 year recession MIGHT restore the balance.

tallpilot

We're not recruiting any street captains at C5. 1 or 2 per month at best. I suspect Endeavor will do slightly better but the well is pretty dry.

KirillTheThrill

Street captains are just not applying to a dumpster fire operation buddy.

ninerdriver

Obviously, it was to give you something else to complain about.

edv2021

I really didn’t think he needed more of those!

rickair7777

When skywest did this about five(?) years ago, they extended the same longevity credit to old hires... so a lot of folks got at least a year or two bump.

rickair7777

Yeah, a friend of mine is doing DEC now, and there's only a couple of them in the pipeline at OO (where they run classes of about 100).

Most folks who have the time go to majors, or stay and upgrade where they're at.

preflight

I was just wondering why we are giving people who are already here half credit for previous non-ALPA 121 time while giving OTS people full credit, which seems to be a message to folks with previous time that they should leave and go get a big bonus plus credit for all their previous time...so I was trying to find out what the rationale was?