Flyboy68

Just a quick count of the numbers of retirements for UA, AA, DL, FDX and UPS for the next 5 years, 2019-2023.

AA - 4067 = 26.8% of pilots
DL - 3353 = 22.9%
UA - 2130 = 17%
FDX - 780 = 17%
UPS - 440 = 16%

Total of 10,770 between the 5. So of the current 49,563 pilots at these five airlines, 21.7% will be retiring in the next 5 years. Could be as much as 25% with loss medicals and early retirements.

Pretty exciting times.

aviatrix28

Is there any info on the number of retirements for HAL?

AAfng

Maybe i dont know where to look but aa pilots shows 14,800 pilots. Your numbers for aa indicate over 15,100. Aa retiring % is even higher than whats shown above. I think.

Flyboy68

Not on this site. I got the numbers from the "Airline Profiles" section.

Flyboy68

It very well could be. I was just working with the numbers on the airline profiles section.

If your numbers are correct, it's even worse for them. Their profile shows 15,176 pilots.

Hell, AA's numbers look even worse (or better for us) for the 5 years after 2023.

2024 - 932
2025 - 951
2026 - 908
2027 - 770
2028 - 676

4236 total

I don't think their military pipeline will be able to replace those numbers.

Waborita

Those numbers for UPS are incorrect as well. UPS will have 277 mandatory age 65 retirements from 2019-2023. We currently have 2870 pilots on the seniority list. 531 F/O ‘s bypassing Captain upgrade.

Flyboy68

This site shows 2725 and it probably hasn't been updated in a bit.

This is what they show for retirements.
2019|t| - 72
2020|t| - 94
2021|t| - 93
2022|t| - 96
2023|t| - 85

420 total

Wonder why the difference in retirements?

BrownDoubles

Because people retired early... and will continue to.

AAfng

It weird because a little part of me worries AA wont be able to keep up with the training. Things are moving too fast for them right now, let alone when we retire close to 1,000 pilots a year for multiple years in a row. Great for seniority advancement but if I have to fly 90hrs a month every month because they dont have enough pilots then F that. Not saying that is going to happen, just wondering what else they can do????

Excargodog

Personal opinion only:

I think they made a mistake with the flow.

They managed to convince everybody who WASN'T at an AA wholly owned, that it wasn't worthwhile even applying to AA because they were going to take people ONLY from the WO regional's and the military, depriving themselves of applicants from the REST of the regional group, which is certainly a whole lot bigger than just the WOs.

And in doing so, they also created a filter that screens out many of the people they would most like to keep while retaining many people that normally wouldn't have been their top picks.

There is something seriously wrong with a system when you have to FORCE upgrades. There is something seriously wrong with a system when you need DECs. It's a system that can't keep the highly motivated people you would really like to hire at the next level but offers a guaranteed path to the least motivated or the ones that never got around to getting their degrees or had a high number of training failures or DUIs and otherwise wouldn't have been competitive.

Look at some of the advice being tendered in the career section to guys with blemished records, either training or legal, or to guys who never went to college. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everyone is like that or that nobody with those issues can ever become a great airline pilot anyway, what I am saying is that AA with their flow will now be getting quite a few people that - by historical standards - they wouldn't have accepted, perhaps as a conscious trade off to get their regional feed cheaply in terms of both regional wages and work rules.

Whether the people they get through this mechanism will be somehow "better" or "worse" than their historical hires and whether they will integrate well with all the ex military hires is anyone's guess at this point.

Best case AA will have come up with a cheap pipeline that assures they will have plenty of pilots. Worst case they will sort of become the Mesa of the majors, not bad, not illegal, and not unsafe, but just carrying the reputation of where you wound up if you couldn't get anywhere else. And again, a lot of good pilots from the non-WO will, rightly or wrongly, not seriously consider them because they believe they can't compete against the flow, making that somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Time, as they say, will tell....