explain to me why any RATIONAL person would NOT be doing this? Yeah, there may be a few, someone with a new kid who wants to maintain his/her seniority for another year for scheduling purposes, but if you were hiring for a major would you really want people who weren’t actively trying to do things to improve their chances of getting hired?


i don’t think anyone will have any option other than to do that. And the regionals will need to either fold or take the Atlas route of putting anyone they can get in training and hoping they can make it through and then hoping they don’t do any serious damage to the brand if they do.

The person this was directed at was saying people would be silly to leave for Spirit because we have the flow. You would be surprised, we have people content with waiting out the flow, we also have lots that are doing whatever they can to get out early.

I mean, there are other options, it is just a question of IF they want to use them. The seniority number option was mentioned for example. This could easily lock in all kinds of benefits.

1. Day one at regional you get a mainline seniority number. Recruitment troubles instantly become a thing of the past, especially for the early adopters.
2. Pay scales stay the same, based on aircraft size, but you know your number will always be climbing.
3. No rush to move on or jump from company to company as you are accruing seniority.
4. Solves the problem on both fronts. Encourages people to join at the regional level and keeps them there for a scheduled amount of time, all the while filling your retirement vacancies at a predictable rate.
5. This won't happen however, mostly due to APA and the added perceived cost of giving someone a seniority number that early.

Maybe once ALPA can be useful finally for a regional, if they come up with this deal.

I would be more concerned with what ALPA gives up in return.

Problem is that mainline AA off street hiring would tank (at least talking better applicants), as why would someone leave the military to be forever leapfrogged for 6+ years of regional pilots flowing in above them?

I mean I guess they would have to have a provision in place to protect a military pilot. Would seem pretty simple and most people in this industry accept that military flyers leap frog them already, so I would imagine this would be received without much resistance.

Could be something along the lines of the military pilot takes a seniority number equivalent to their class average or something.

What do you mean, class average? They now bump all the reservists who were hired ten years earlier while the active duty guys were doing their 10 year ADSC? That would be a disaster for recruiting.

The clock is ticking, people are interviewing as we speak. They better come up with something or there won’t be any captains or senior FO’s left.

not sure I understand what you saying. To what I was saying you just take a military guy and give them a number that is the same as the new hire class they are in. My point was military pilots already get a leg up on hiring over regional pilots so this would be no different.

this would allow them still hire military pilots without the problem of being leap frogged by all the regional pilots below them with a seniority number. Pretty sure any regional pilot would totally fine with that assuming they received a seniority number on day one of WO service.

so you would interdigitate the new hire military into an existing seniority list? So for every military new hire every person on the WO list finds themselves bumped BACKWARDS in seniority? And that won’t create any resentment? How about the guy retiring with 20 years in who comes to the WO to knock off the dust from a decade of flying a desk. So once he gets the dust knocked off, his WO number goes away, and everyone else takes a step back?