FlyingR6

Dude, give it up. It's not like we are the only ones hiring in a sea of furloughs. We are allowed to be disappointed in our standings amongst our peers. Personally, this feeling is only amplified by management touting how we were going to come out the other side with flying colors. As we trickle upgrades and continue to push off ATL, Spirit is hiring and upgrading like mad. Not to mention legacies are in hyper drive for hiring.

EAFF95

No need to get bent out of shape.

I was expecting with not running a vacancy bid for the month prior that there would be more vacancies since we hired something like 70 new hires for the two months that this bid is supposed to cover.

I'm as grateful as anyone to have positive changes especially after covid.

Aero1900

That sounds right to me.

1 plane/ month just doesn't require large hiring numbers. But I do think it'll be fairly consistent.

Powderkeg

I’m not disagreeing with you, but follow the money. We don’t work for Spirit or a legacy…we work for an investment company. What are the pilots/plane numbers are NK and the legacies? Guarantee it’s higher than 15 and I’m guessing ours goes lower over time. We are always going to be thinner than the Jones’. Our idea of being on the “other side” with flying colors is different from Management’s idea. In a way it sucks, but I’ll take a measured approach vs hire until furlough over the long term.

Notarealpilot

It’s 12 upgrades and 42 FO spots they have to back fill the upgrades so the FO list grows by 30.

Punkah Louvre

All companies are 'Investment Companies' -they exist to generate a return on investment. It really doesn't make much of a difference if the 'Owners' are Private Equity funds or traditional Shareholders -mostly Institutions like retirement funds & Banks.
The 'Cost' in ULCC is not the ticket price; its the Operating Cost, so yes; by definition we're thinner than the legacies.

From the available public information it looks (unsurprisingly) that Spirit has a similar Pilot to Plane ratio. I could see ours actually increasing as we add block hours per airframe though we're likely getting pretty close to the limit. That said, as the fleet gets younger (we're retiring a good number of ceos) and bringing on new neos perhaps we eke out further gains.

As much as we all wish we'd grown faster out of covid, its likely management understood the pitfalls of the recovery better than some of our competitors. There no point upgrading 100 FO's if the operation stalls and takes 5 days to reset. I think we're doing just fine....

turbojet28

Thanks for making this point. I frequently hear people talk about how we are owned by “an investment company”.

Xdashdriver

Yep and our "investment company" solely invests in airlines so they understand airline economics/insutry dynamics a lot better than "regular" investors.

Powderkeg

Why is it a bad idea to acknowledge this? Delta pads their block times to show better D0/A14…Southwest pays their PR team to minimize the effect of overrunning a threshold or sucking a passenger out a window…F9 cares about nothing other than margins. Realizing this, and it’s effect on our day to day operations (including new hires and upgrades), may make you sleep better at night.

DL, LUV, etc are NOT investment companies, they are airlines. They care about opinions and perceptions. F9 cares about the bottom line. It’s not a bad thing, embrace it.

turbojet28

The point is that when it comes down to it, all airlines (and all businesses for that matter) are owned completely by investors. F9, even pre-IPO, is no different in that aspect. Sure, the formalities of how those investors are organized and categorized may be different, but the end goal is identical. Each leadership team has developed a business model and plan and is executing it to their best ability in order to maximize value for the stakeholders of the company. People like to pretend that somehow we are different because our primary stakeholders are organized under a differently-labeled umbrella. My point is that, sure, some of the formalities and terms are different, but that ultimately it doesn’t matter in the slightest. All I’m concerned with is how strong of a business we have, and from what I can tell, it’s pretty strong.

All those other companies ultimately care only about their bottom line also. They just are on their own paths and executing their own ideas toward maximizing that goal.