Thanks for that. Maybe the 60 pilots in the past was for Orientation, and not Indoc? Does anyone know what the typical number used to be?

before April they averaged 30-40 per indoc. Massive reduction

My orientation class was 60 people, and we were split into 3 groups of 20 for Indoc. A reduction to 6 or 7 per Indoc class is crazy and doesn’t really make sense from a lack of sim instructor standpoint because more than half of my sim instructors were not line pilots. They were typically not even former line pilots and many of them never actually flew the 175, just typed in it by Envoy so they can teach.

We have two brand new sims in the Avenger building solely for our use, plus an old AA 190 sim that’s also at avenger, and then at least one more at CAE and probably at least one more at the other avenger building but I don’t remember it now lol. 6-7 people would mean not even one of those sims would be used all day. I was told recurrent sim training happened on the weekend to facilitate the simulator availability for initial training on the weekdays, but I’ll see next month when I go to recurrent if they’re all just sitting idle

The slowdown is most likely a result of the current hiring market. With all of the big three at one point announcing no summer classes at all (I think UA may start up soonish again though?), Southwest done for a while, and Sprit talking about downgrades and furloughs, the attrition over the summer has slowed considerably. No flows for multiple months already this year and reduced hiring elsewhere probably has the staffing looking a little bit on the “fat” side so there isn’t a need to put 20+ through every week or two when monthly attrition is probably right around 10 for the next few months. I’m sure August/September/October classes will start to slowly get larger again and you might even see some larger end-of-July classes to have people ready for holiday flying.

Just had a reliable source in the jumpseat, and was told the reduced numbers for classes are true. They're scheduled to be back up to full classes after the summer. Didn't go into detail. I'd be curious to know why given the sim situation, as you pointed out, unless we lost sim instructors, which I really can't imagine is the case.

See my post above your reply. TLDR; attrition has crawled to a halt to pretty much all carriers. Nobody out = no need to have large classes.

Ah, I see. He "most likely" was confused then, as he said that August/September would bring back 50+ classes, which wouldn't be the case if it were due to attrition, since they'd have no way of knowing it would be "back to normal" by then.

I'm hearing Envoy plans to onboard 10 new hires a month through the summer. The latest picture of a new hire class--probably from Linked In--had 7 pilots in the picture.

He’s probably still right but it’s just nothing to do with any sim or instructor shortage and 100% on AA not flowing until September and having basically every other airline also not hiring through the summer. They can onboard a few in the next 2 months to cover the attrition into September and then probably ramp up the class sizes in August again to meet demand October onward. I wouldn’t be surprised if AA told them to scale back hiring through the summer months so that there weren’t as many getting paid to sit reserve and not be used. Once the big three + Southwest start cranking out start date letters again, you’ll see Envoy start to pick up. There are still new planes headed to Envoy which is good and which also means when the class sizes recover, they should go back to full scale of 35-55ish depending on how many they can squeeze in a classroom per week.

I'd agree. I said I was curious to know why, given the sim and instructor numbers are good. The orders from on high at AA make the most sense. I mean, they've cut many things lately to save money, so it fits the theme.