Originally Posted by Irishblackbird

Fine, they can backfill all the s@!ty regional jobs with the lousy pay and crap work rules.... or better yet maybe it would kill off the regional model altogether without pilots. ALPA needs to take a stand against this and put pressure on government not allow our jobs to be outsourced. There are plenty of US citizens that are qualified pilots still not getting hired by the legacy's. When airlines can start a training academy and demand that over 50 percent of jobs will go to minorities tells me that we have enough pilots here in the US. Flooding the market with foreigners only delays airlines from having to negotiate pay and good contracts. Also, what will happen when there is a recession and pilots are furloughed, will foreign pilots still have a job, while a junior US pilot sits unemployed?

If upgrades slow due to stagnation, fine. That also means profits and expansion will slow as well. How long do you think shareholders will tolerate that? Right now JetBlue and Spirit are reducing schedules because pilots have choices and are going to legacy's in favor of better pay and career progression as well as the yet to be determined merger. Choices are good, and something we haven't seen in this industry in decades. Let's not kill it in favor of foreign pilots taking our jobs for a short term fix of poor management.

Originally Posted by dualinput

Somehow surgeons don’t suffer from a lack of applicants to med school. I wonder why that is?

Who cares about upgrades. Make the captain scale the new FO scales. Bring all the regional pilots onto the mainline contract and stop the outsourcing. Then and only then might I listen to someone saying shoratage.

Originally Posted by dualinput

Somehow surgeons don’t suffer from a lack of applicants to med school. I wonder why that is?

Who cares about upgrades. Make the captain scale the new FO scales. Bring all the regional pilots onto the mainline contract and stop the outsourcing. Then and only then might I listen to someone saying shoratage.

Originally Posted by Fat Old Tired

Yeah, isn't it interesting that these high paying careers like a surgeon have absolutely no shortage? Maybe if airlines paid us at the legacies a better wage there would be no shortage. Instead they cry wolf to government to reduce entry requirements.

Originally Posted by tnkrdrvr

This^^^^^

Rickair, isn’t wrong about the dangers of letting the shortage become too extreme, but neither should the danger of foreign pilots undercutting us on cost. The major pilot unions need to walk the high wire on this issue. To far one way or the other and we get screwed, potentially for decades. Australian pilots aren’t a real threat because there are so few of them. However, if that door gets opened much wider, you may see a new ULCC business model that undercuts costs by hiring foreign pilots for sun-regional wages.

Originally Posted by APCHCLIMB

yeah but don’t kid yourself those guys are def over worked. 80-100 hours a week depending on specialty.
can you imagine some delta pilot working 80-100 hours a week? Oh the outrage.

Originally Posted by Irishblackbird

When airlines can start a training academy and demand that over 50 percent of jobs will go to minorities tells me that we have enough pilots here in the US.

Originally Posted by biigD

Yeah, I have some pretty direct knowledge of what it's like to be a surgeon, and I don't think many of us at the major airline level would trade our job for any of theirs, to say nothing of the ~5 year residency (plus a fellowship year or two to specialize) they have to endure first. That said, the original point about high pay to prevent a shortage still holds: the process to become a surgeon is brutal, yet fresh faced doctors line up for the suck because they know they'll have a half-million+ dollar job on the other side.

Originally Posted by rickair7777

It's not the legacy schedules as much as the pain to get there... word got out over the last couple decades and scared a lot of folks away.

In truth, it's also a generational issue... with a little effort and dues paying, you can get an excellent life-time job by age 30 with pay and schedules which are not really available in any other career field at that age. Have good QOL and make many millions, or FIRE by age 45-ish, your choice.

But many youth don't like the drug-free aspect, and they also don't like the fact that you have to do work sometimes, and you can't always call out when you don't feel like working. For some it's just easier to hang out and game in Mom's basement, work when you want to, and get a new low-end job every time they fire you for too many no-shows.