Undesirable in the sense that there are several other regionals with junior domiciles in those locations, and all of them pay better than Mesa.

 

I hope ORD comes back as a domicile! I loved the flying there.

 

Did your friend start at Mesa? How many were in his new hire class? I think it may be getting pretty dire very quickly.

 

No he hasn't decided yet. But according to the recruiters, the well has run dry.

Also, number 1199 on the Oct. 13th global list, is 1156 as of today. That means 43 left in 5.5 weeks. In that same time I've moved up 10, and I am around 2/3 down the list. So, 33/43 people who left were in the bottom third of the seniority list, i.e. have been here 14 months or less.

This will be fun. No idea who will fill the right seat of all these new planes. But JO needs to hurry up and figure something out to stop the FO bleeding. It's high time pay goes up. That's the only answer.

 

I completely agree with you that JO needs to pony up some money for the pilots. But, don't we need some better ALPA representation first? We just elected some MEC and now we need LEC and then for these guys to find some negotiators and get them trained. How long will all of this take? And we are around the holidays and these guys won't do sh't until after Jan. 1st.

 

Here's some more napkin math to chew on. We have 1194 pilots on the seniority list. Let's say 50 or so are on leaves of absence, not flying. That puts us at roughly 1150 flying pilots. We have 115 planes (incl the 200). That's roughly 1150 pilots we need. We are staffed for that. That ratio (10:1) is what Foley is on record as saying his goal is to staff Mesa adequately (we know long term that won't happen). Factor in roughly 40-50 in training at any given month (initial and upgrade), not flying revenue flights, and we are under 10:1. We can still make that work for a little while.

However, I think we hired 5-10 in Nov and don't know how we will do in Dec/Jan with recruiting/retention, but we aren't getting a whole lot in class. We have lost over 20 a month the last few months consistently, maybe more. At this rate we won't be able to staff the current planes we have in 6 months, much less be able to staff the projected growth.

 

Without flow/preferential hiring agreements or more-desirable bases like LAX/DEN/ORD (or even IAD--ANYWHERE but South Texas), I think we're going to have a tough time staffing the next 15 EJets.

A more pessimistic person might say "we're screwed."

With the fairly-solid flows (by historical standards) being offered up by Envoy, Piedmont, PSA, and now CommutAir, and the vastly better pay (and equalizing upgrade times) at places like Skywest/TSA/Compass (oh, and all of the places with flows), it has become mighty tough to convince a new hire to come here.

JO isn't going to offer us more pay. He might throw a few thousand bucks at new hires or in referral bonuses etc., but we didn't get these EJets by bidding average cost. They'll just tell UAL we can't staff it if we can't at the cost we bid it at, and cancel the deliveries we inherited from Republic if we eff it up.

I'm an optimistic person and I've been a Mesa cheerleader for a long time on here. But "better" base options and/or preferential hiring agreements are the only things that are going to bring Mesa up to par with what other regionals are offering (at the costs we've bid our flying). And I think we've already scraped the barrel from coast to coast and around the world in terms of recruitment, and then some.

A DEN/LAX/SFO/ORD base would probably buy us enough allure to cover the next 15 EJets and backfill the upgrades. Alternatively, a preferential hiring agreement with United (similar to CommutAir's) would solidify hiring for the next few years going forward, and stabilize attrition. Can our management team see/secure that? Who knows...time will tell.

I don't see us staffing the next 15 EJets unless a preferential hiring agreement or additional EJet bases are announced. It's going to be a fun winter if our higher-ups don't see that writing on the wall (God love 'em I hope they read this). Us average line Captains have very little say in decisions like opening a new pilot base or not, but we sure as heck have the realtime pulse of the FOs and what they're thinking, saying, and planning on doing--all of the above is my anecdotal assessment of where thing are heading w/o a flow/preferential interview with ANYONE and w/o other EJet domiciles besides IAH.

 

Mesa(we) is(are) screwed.
Looking at the PBS awards, quite a few CA's at DFW show their schedule as completely empty. Either they were taken off line, or much more likely, have moved on to bigger and better places. Quite a few Jr. Dfw CA's are now line holders. Did M.K. Get on with a major? When you see senior CA's and others who seemed to be lifers move on, you know the ship is sinking.

 

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