You can take a B737 into the same airfields that an E145 can go. SWA has proven that you don’t need regionals its time for the legacy airlines to pay up and quit penalizing pilots for a passion to fly for a living.

 

Ms Nelson: "It's insufficient and is part of the reason you have twice as many pilots with certificates to fly today as are performing the job today"

from the FAA, U.S. Civil Airmen Statistics, Annual Statistics.

Estimate of active certificate holders as of 12/31/2016
ATP = 157,894
Commercial = 96,081
Total = 253,975

Total Airline jobs. The only answer I verified was Boeing's estimate of needing 85,000 airline pilots.

1:00:44: Mr Childs: Yeah, but none of those other pilots are worth a darn.

 

It's nice to have dreams.

 

Whence is he deriving those numbers? 18000 in three years? That is completely fabricated.

 

We have to beat them at their own game. Crying on the forum only goes so far. Time to take action. I blast these clowns with emails pretty much weekly: [email protected] and the general email is [email protected]

 

This.
No one is going to hear your complaints on the forum.
Take a few minutes to send an email.

 

Just before the shortage, a friend of mine was illegally fired by a regional airline where he had been a Captain for 6 years. They violated a bunch of laws because they thought they would save a few dollars and a new Captain with 6 years less seniority would save them about 15,000 a year. It all became exposed and liability was clear so then they wanted to argue about damages.

They accused him of failure to mitigate damages because it took a long time to get a new flying job having just been fired. He had several degrees and could have done a lot of things. They argue that he could have made as much in almost any other job as a regional airline pilot. A new manager at Jiffy Lube makes more. A starting computer software engineer made 50% more. They went down a long long list of other jobs he was qualified to do and each one paid more than an experienced airline regional captain. They took the deposition of the guy who cut his lawn and the lady that came in every 2 weeks to clean his house to show that they made more money than he did as a regional airline captain before he was terminated.

There is no shortage of pilots out there, there is only a shortage of pilots willing to start over for 30,000 a year. Most of the pilots at my old airline went overseas after it closed. For the right pay we could get thousands of American pilots to come home from overseas.

Pay me more and I will fly more hours a month. Until then I fly the minimum. If I need more money I will go mow lawns. I get calls all the time from people wanting to come back to flying but they just don't want to take the pay cut.

 

I have a long list of pilots who would love to come back to flying but are not going to do it for 30,000 a year. Market value for a first officer right now is about 80,000 and for a regional captain is about 150,000. Until those levels are reached there will not be enough pilot willing to fly.

I get emails to go fly my former aircraft almost every day with starting salary of over 200,000 a year. Right now the only thing keeping regional pilot salaries down are the contracts, the first year bonuses, and the fact that regional pilots don't know their value and don't value themselves.

Its the pay, the pay and nothing but the pay.

 

Get paid more as a first year instructor than at Child's airline. Maybe if you didn't pay less than a flight position with lower minimums, you might attract more pilots. Just a thought.

 

He thinks the answer is loans? No, you greedy tool, pay your damn pilots!