Awesome, good to hear.
I’ve also heard all bus classes for a while. Friend is in the Jan 8 class, and they’ve been told all bus.

 

580 in 2020 from the school house.

 

580 but is this a move to just get pilots in the door and hold em on rsv?
Question is where is the new flying and routes?
I would guess the neos will be straight swap replacements for ceo s just like the 220s for the 190s
Europe will only be a handful of flights per day.
I write this as a slightly concerned person hanging out in p2 not bashing jb in any way just genuinely interested.

 

There has been no announcement to park or lose any 320s. We are in growth mode. This company doesn’t hire for fun. They run staffing as lean as possible. In fact some in FLOPS think we should fly RSVs every day and fly the rest of the schedule on goodwill and hope.

 

Lol, your second question was exactly mine. What are we going to do with them? We Have from 18-22 321’s and a 220 coming next year. I also asked what the heck are we going to do with the planes? I think they aren’t sharing the whole story which is fine, but they are having a problem communicating the big picture.

I think they plan to add frequency and continue “connecting the dots”. But that’s been the story for a REALLY long time.

Hard to argue with a profitable company, easy to argue with no profit sharing.

 

JB is woefully undermanned. The significant hiring, if it actually occurs, will be more to address that problem (2020 summer vacations are quickly approaching) than it is due to expansion.

 

Meanwhile load factors are struggling to stay above 80%. Can’t grow for too much longer with those numbers.

 

Have you read any quarterly reports or investor presentations? In every publication, it mentions the 60 (now 70) A220s are replacing the E190s because the cost/CASM of the E190s is too high. It mentions nothing about parking A321s. The A321s are our newest planes and certainly aren’t getting swapped, sold, or parked. Our oldest A320s are almost 20 and still have 5-10 years of life. They are spending millions refreshing the cabins of all the old 320s right now. You didn’t even ask if there was a plan to park the 321s, you assert it as your theory about what will happen. Curious how you came up with that? 321s, especially 1-5 year old 321s like ours, aren’t getting parked by anyone except companies going bankrupt (WOW/Thomas cook/etc). They have a much better CASM than 320s, and ours are much newer than our 320s...and we paid for many of them in cash. It would make no sense to park/sell them. Also, we are actively shopping for used 321CEOs because our NEO deliveries have been delayed (contractually we were supposed to get 12 in 2019 and we got 5). Sounds like you didn’t do your homework researching the company you applied to and interviewed at?

Also, companies don’t just hire pilots to get them on property and keep them on reserve. Maybe at regionals? But getting someone on our pay scale before they are needed, not to mention benefit costs, is expensive, and Jetblue isn’t in the business of spending money when it doesn’t have to...especially on excess pilots. There is a balance of reserve needs, balancing reserve utilization and premium payout/cancelations, with the goal being the lowest cost possible for the company. We have habitually been understaffed and blew thru our premium pay budget in the first 3-4 months of 2019 because we didn’t have enough pilots. We took 5 airplanes this year and hired 405ish, lost 91ish, so the net gain of 314ish pilots was to cover staffing needs driven by the CBA. But our reserve grids are still bad for the most part.

As far as the routes, that info is available on google. We’ve announced new routes and added frequencies for the coming year. If you want to spend some time reading about our network and route additions/changes, this has a lot of info. We are at max slot capacity at JFK, so we can’t really add routes there without taking them away from other cities (though we continue to do that...GYE for example). Also maxed at LGA for now. We are growing EWR Ops by a small amount. We are growing BOS, mostly with added frequencies, but there will be some new routes as we continue to grow there. We are growing FLL as well and will grow MCO after the we move into the new terminal. I would guess ONT will gain some flights, not sure about LAX, and who knows about LGB. Finding a viable alternative for SoCal is the issue.

As much as I’d like 500 pilots coming in behind me just to sit reserve so I could get a break (or just sit long call and never get used), that ain’t happening, unfortunately. Not sure what the downside to that would be though and why you’d be worried about that. Getting paid 100-300k to sit reserve and not do anything sounds pretty good to me. But if you’re worried about us parking 321s, or otherwise not adding enough routes, I’d suggest maybe applying at frontier or spirit. They are growing a lot faster than we are and adding all sorts of routes, each with more 320/321s on order than we have on order.

 

They’ve always had a comms problem. It’s like watching an infomercial at 3am. Not sure what it is. But it’s awesome. It’s worked for others and they’re sure you’ll love it!

Now where’s the checkbook.

 

Hire just to hold people on Reserve....LMAO