Last year, Delta hired 500 pilots, front loaded them January-March, and only 60 pilots flowed. Now we know 2026 hiring will be ~500 as well, with classes most likely January-March again (with edv flows training April-June after 3 month hold back).

At this rate of 60 Endevor pilots flowing to Delta a year, how long would it take a new hire today to flow under CAP? I don’t see Delta hiring every month of the year again for a long time.

 

Thats more or less a traditional hiring pattern. Delta’s need for pilots peaks May through mid August. They need to have pilots starting class by the end of March to meet that demand and allow them to get instructors back on the line for the summer surge.

 

Flow is career insurance, and it's a great thing to have. There are guys who, sometime entirely without fault, spent decades at the regionals. Flow puts a backstop to that. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close and much better than anything else.

But it should never, ever, ever be your main plan. If you're wondering about time to flow, you are doing it wrong. Wanna be all type-A? Obsess about time to upgrade and how many hours you can actually block in a year if you hustle. Time to 1000 TPIC is the metric that will tell you how quick you can get to a career job.

 

There’s a billion variables in there but if everyone at EDV went to DAL and you get rid of the lifers on the seniority list, you’re right around 14-1500 pilots. At 60 flows/yr, that’s 25 years.

 

How many endeavor pilots are there? Let’s call it 2k. That’s 33 years. Obviously, there will be attrition, people staying, etc, but a decade would be optimistic.

 

Yeah, with the current sad state of hiring at F9, B6, and WN ( and the less said about NK who is continuing to furlough the better), you are really looking at the legacies for hiring. And if DL is only going to flow 60 a year from Endeavor, it might be quite a wait:

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From now on, anyone that trys to tell me hiring is "normal", I'm going to show them this chart. At the going rate it seems like we just might bridge 4000 hires this year, which is the lowest number since 2016. The only reason there's even that many is because of the mind-boggling amount of hiring coming from 3 airlines. You have to go all the way back to 2013 to see the same amount of zeros on the chart.

And before some lost-decade'r comes at me with "look at what it was in '08"; yeah man, I know. It was terrible then. But it isn't like people are hyper fixating on 2023 and wondering why they haven't been hired at that pace. This year will likely be the worst year in 10 years.

Of course, all of that said leaves out 2020. Obviously hiring wasn't great then.

 

I think a lot of people have a distorted view of hiring history by being biased by the post pandemic period. In anticipation of years of reduced flying, many companies offered incentivized early retirements to pilots who promptly took it. Between that and the high number of age forced retirements the unexpected quick return of pax demand caused a hiring spree that was pretty much unprecedented. While you talk about the last ten years (and throw out 2020) looking at a longer period enables you to get a better look at the historical norm. Here’s the 15 years before your 10 year look back period:

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By that metric, hiring is actually pretty good right now. There was only one years in those 15 the entire hiring exceeded this year’s year to date, with three months hiring yet to be counted.

https://www.fapa.aero/pilot-hiring-history

Now having said that, anyone waiting for a flow of 60 pilots a year from a group of 1800 is still going to wait quite awhile.

 

Yes, man. I know that the market in the lost decade was a lot worse than now. My point is to try to illustrate how "normal" 4000+ hires is to a lot of people, as it has been the norm every year since 2016, with 2020 being the outlier. It isn't people's perception being warped by the post covid boom. It is the personal experience of every aspiring 121 pilot since 2016, which is a lot of people. I started in 2019, pre covid. Back then, it wasn't that common to see a 2000+ hr CFI. It's a lot more common now...

 

4000 pilots hired is historically high and the norm for the past decade and this year was a slow year. That number also doesn't include any of the regionals, most 121 cargo companies, 135 operators, netjets, flexjet, or other 91 operators. Hiring has been good its just getting flooded with entry level guys coming up on atp mins. Doesn't help that schools keep stating that there is a pilot shortage going on, but they gotta bring in business.

https://acronaviationacademy.com/usa...ess-explained/