I'm likely wrong here, but here is a wild guess. But could this be happening because maybe mainline is preparing to reduce flying in the summer or maybe even reorganizing, while they plan to have regionals cover a lot more of their domestic routes for cost savings since its unlikely passenger loads will be back to normal by the summer?

At face value, the “shift everything to the cheaper regionals” violates the mainline pilot scope clauses. Possible workarounds include

1) bankruptcy
2) tax avoidance style legal but fancy scheduling shenanigans
3) straight up violations, grieve-it-all, let the judge sort it out

but most likely is some anticipated reshuffle of flying from one carrier to another. This becomes interesting quickly

That was my thought process as well. Assuming no new fleet type, the list of possible victims is quite short..

But who? The only regional carriers that fly CRJs for AA are Mesa and Skywest. Mesa has a new contract with American and Skywest has added 20 more CRJs to AA's side. Something is definitely going on, but there's not many ways PSA can expand.

This might be worth a read regarding that Mesa contract.
https://www.ch-aviation.com/portal/n...rican-airlines

I didn't know that part of the deal. Still that's only the option of up to 10 for this year. So even if they did reduce it by 10 and give it to us we are still a smaller airline and fleet since we got rid of 19 deuces. Then if they do the other 10 aircraft that's through 2023. So again if we get all those aircraft we will be back to the size we were 2019 levels airframe wise end of 2023 (technically a gain of 1 aircraft).

I would like to be hopeful and optimistic but hiring just doesn't make sense. They went worst case scenario with all the furloughs and it was all doom and gloom in October. Travel is still dismal like it was back then with the occasional jump due to holidays. Yes I understand the vaccine rolled out but even that hasn't gone according to plan. So again I'm not angry we are hiring I just don't see how it makes any sense. It's like they are going all in on a bet and hoping it pays off with the cash burn that is taking place at American. If they go all in and we still see 30-40% of travelers all year then what...

All this taking place with talks of PBS that would make us more efficient and require less pilots if it passes...

Some things to consider are that a good percentage of those furloughed won't return, and once hiring picks up again at the LCC's attrition will be through the roof.

https://i.ibb.co/fkyZ61D/562-2.jpg​​​​​​

It's important to note that it reads like a planned phase-out of Mesa. Easier for planning and operations to shift a fleet gradually than a massive one-two punch in 2021 and 2022 as the previous contracts expired.

My guess is no PSA base in DFW until 2022 or later.

I can see AAG making PSA primarily DFW/CLT, Envoy ORD/DFW/PHX and PDT PHL/DCA/CLT