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Originally Posted by Excargodog
The problem is that the AAG business model REQUIRES regional feed and they DON’T (at least not yet) need flow. They can (at least at present) meet their mainline new hire needs by hiring ex military, hiring away competitors regional pilots, and hiring ULCC people who are still junior enough to be tempted. But increasing the rate of acquisition of their own regional pilots would just hurt their bottom line. They’d much rather hurt their competitors bottom lines by stealing their pilots than make it harder to keep their own regionals fully staffed.
That model only works if no one else hires WO pilots. At my shop, there's a LOT more leaving to DAL, UAL, FDX, etc. Probably the only reason they haven't metered flow is because the moment they do that the only thing they'd accomplish is incentivizing more pilots to leave for other carriers.
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And I really think if F9 and NK do something about their ludicrous first year pay, a lot of regionals are going to lose a lot of reasonably senior people.
Ha! No, as a broad market segment they're just going to go after 1,000 hour R-ATP CFIs. I mean, the 320 was designed in Europe around a 250 TT MPL FO. Heck, maybe universities just swap out their CRJ trainers for 320s and everyone can graduate with a type. Get the LCCs to sponsor the hardware.
All of which exacerbates my point above, regionals are going to start being squeezed from both ends.
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This will be interesting to watch play out.
On that we agree.