So would you say hiring won’t start back up till summer of 2022?

ALL MD80 E190 B757 B767 A330-300 pilots will pretty much require new types, but it is far worse than that. There’s a domino effect. The senior pilots tend to bid the popular bases and most lucrative equipment. Junior people get what’s left. But the PSP has stopped that domino effect - so you have senior guys not flying currently that will outbid the junior guys in the same equipment, at least for upgrades and possibly for displacements.

it will be a fustercluck for the first year or two.

I stick with my guess of Q1 '22. Upthread I mentioned the rumors around DL hiring as early as Q4 this year. While DL didn't officially furlough, they had a large number of early outs, a very large number of people sitting UNA (unassigned) for awhile, and some new hires who never made it through the initial cycle. This is in addition to fleet retirements and base closures that shuffled alot of bodies.

The point of mentioning DL is that AA has all of that as well as substantially more projected (pre-Rona, so some adjustment via early outs) retirements over the next 5-10 years. Will AA go into 2022 a smaller airline that it was in Q1 2020? Yes, but so will DL and UA. Just to maintain that smaller airline in the face of retirements, AA will have to hire. In order to fly the summer '22 schedule, grab market share, and eventually return to its previous size as the industry recovers, AA will have to hire. Take all that for what it's worth, but I also wouldn't give into the apocalyptic doom and gloom.

Yeah AA will come out of all this, much like the other big three. What will need to happen in order to get there is anybody’s guess. Shrink, BK 11, concessions, a little of both? It really is a shot in the dark and we all have our theories, but they are best educated guesses.

I truly hope they recover quickly, lots of amazing pilots working for them that need it to happen.

You make very good points. AA will have to hire in 2022 but my guess is it won’t be what we saw prior to COVID. For those who got hire prior to the fall of 2016 I say you can add another 1 to 2 years to their flow time.

Addition to flow? I think we're talking about an extra 2 years at minimum. Perhaps 3 years. I don't think it's longer than that though.

But an extra 1 year? We're already at the extra year with mainline pilots still out that need to be pulled back in and trained before we get to hiring/flowing.

Yea my bad. I mean on top of this already.

Gotcha. Sorry, I might be a bit trigger happy. What you say makes sense if one considers this past year already gone, which it is.

Haha Naww is all good! This whole thing has got everyone like that. No worries.

Just read the AA mainline thread where they talk about LOA’s being approved like crack cocaine in the last bid. That’s pretty much sums up the realistic timeframe of AA hiring picking back up.