there’s tons of demand for low-wage pilot labor.

the problem is supply. In particular supply of high-experience, low-wage labor. You can keep shoveling noobs in the front of the factory, but you need people to stay 6/8/10 years for the system to be self-sustaining with captains and LCA’s.

the current hiring environment makes that impossible for the system as a whole. Skywest has a core of lifers and isn’t constrained by a union contract - they might survive. But what does a carrier do when 3/4 of their LCA’s suddenly leave? The fed can’t buy LCA bonds to goose the supply.

At some point (soon) some unlucky carrier will be the first to park planes. And whichever major loses lift will start throwing money at the problem… probably at the still functioning carriers to keep them functioning. Whoever trips first will get left behind.

 

Much of what you say is true. But there will always be people willing to stay at the smaller carriers because they develop the quality of life they desire through seniority. There may be small variations in the percentages of those that want to do this at a given carrier and true Skywest does have the largest TOTAL number of those people, but probably not a significantly larger percentage. There is, however, an economy of scale that does favor larger carriers and AAG has in the past few years, even before the pandemic, stated their plan and followed through with that plan, of fewer smaller carriers and instead have a few larger carriers. Skywest is certainly the biggest and I don’t doubt that it will survive, especially because it flies for all four major carriers. I don’t doubt that there will be some consolation, just like has happened with the majors over the years. The strong survive and the others either are merged and consumed or just fade away.

Whether or not you intended it to be an argument FOR the survival of the regionals, it is. A few, smaller, carriers will fail to be sustainable and the majors will realize they have to spend more money to keep things going. It may require more investment directly in the regionals and those regionals being wholly owned, or more “mega regionals” similar to Skywest. I still contend that the regional model will still survive because even at a higher price point, it is well below what that smaller gauge feed can be operated by mainline.

 

A question to others on this board. I retired from mainline AA as a pilot 3 years ago, and I don't know the specifics of the flow program. In an effort to educate myself, I went on the web sites of the 3 wholly owned, Envoy, PSA and Piedmont, to see if I could garner any information. On the Envoy website, the concept of a "Flow" program is noticeably absent. It is prominent on the PSA and Piedmont recruitment section.

Is the lack of a "defined flow program" for Envoy a negotiating roadblock with Envoy? Is the company holding this out on the basis of satisfactory conclusion of contract talks? It was my understanding, and it could be wrong, that the flow program was just that. A program, not contractually mandated or defined, and therefore subject to any modification or out and out cancellation by the company.
Can someone tell me what the status of the "flow" program is at Envoy and if it is a contractual item with any wholly owned carrier? I'm just trying to educate myself here.

 

Flow is in the Envoy pilot contract

 

if this were happening slower, maybe. But covid was a perfectly timed workforce whipsaw. You had 18 months of above average retirements and zero new hiring that is all re-equilibrating at once.


”some people” staying isn’t going to make the wheels turn. this is the equivalent of “why do you lose 95% of climb capability with 50% loss of thrust”.


There’s going to be a rapid, dramatic loss of regional lift. Potentially a transient loss but how long can the majors tolerate substantial constraints? How fast can you retrain 145 captains onto the 175? How fast can you move CRJ-550’s onto a new certificate?

The loss of regional lift is coupled to (and caused by) a dramatic need to hire … from the regionals.

Maybe the whole industry doesn’t collapse, but dramatic changes are coming

 

And I think this is the key point. Only 2-3 years ago people were recommending that noobies go to a regional where - if it all hit the fan - you could survive that being your career destination or at least picking one that had flow as a backup, however distant that backup might be. It was a tacit admission that regionals weren’t really ANYBODY’S career desire. Oh yeah, you could certainly survive as a senior CA at most places, and eventually if you got sufficiently embedded in life at your regional base, sufficiently senior, and sufficiently old, it wouldn’t even make sense to move what was left of your family and start over as a junior reserve FO at a major, assuming you even got the offer after spending 20 years with your last type rating being in an obsolescent 50 pax jet. But that was then and this is now.

You can get by with just a cadre of senior guys to do the instructing and the LCA work, but you need over 50% of the pilots being captains to make the airline function. That’s because the CAs have more vacation time, use more sick leave, and are better able to get soft and premium time to fill up their schedule than those with lesser seniority. Yet just the same, you need a CA in every aircraft for every hour an FO flies.

Naw, the problem isn’t finding a few lifers, it’s getting enough to stick around long enough after they have their first 1000 hours of 121 time to AVERAGE another 1000 hours flying as a CA, when even the traditional 1000 hrs of TPIC that was once the minimum entry ticket to a major is no longer necessary. THAT is the problem.

 

Based on what I heard today this union is going to do nothing as AA is going to hire more than 2000 pilots. What about going back to the days of flowing 30 a month?

Sad day. What a low blow to the morale of the envoy pilot group.


TORO

 

Tells you how much AAG values you when they start panic hiring like what they just announced today, and no extra flows are being offered to help with that.

The amount of goodwill they are losing is staggering. Such a low hanging fruit too for them.

 

AA pilot recruitment has said that flows will account for 20% of AAs hiring in 2022.

 

Down from 50%.