Regionals being wiped out with major hiring?
 

So my company came out with an article saying the majors will be hiring 10k pilots next year. 8k will come from regionals.

by my napkin math there’s about 16k regional pilots out there. Could this 2022 hiring spree by majors wipe out half of the regionals?

seems pretty crazy to me. How will this look? My regional is expected to lose about half our pilots next year (300/800). And we can only hire and train 5% of our group per month (40/800).

what will this look like in a year?

A few threads about this already, but the regionals will be decimated. The smaller ones won't exist anymore because the big ones will give huge bonuses to attract the few that remain.

The real problem is captains. The majors will be taking the captains at a much higher rate than FOs. Even if there were 16,000 regional pilots that were qualified for the majors, 1/2 of them are captains and will be gone in a year.

I said it before and I will say it again - if you are a captain at a regional today, you should be able to be at a major airline within the next 14 months. If you are a regional FO, get as many hours as you can and make sure your apps are in and update them weekly. You will be at a major very soon.

Could happen. If push comes to shoves, majors will prioritize manning mainline over regionals.

Likely result would be regional consolidation, since many cannot shrink and still have enough economy of scale to make it work. Mainline can get out of contracts at will when regionals fail to perform.

A massive buyout of SkyWest and/or Republic would be a “checkmate” move. Capture the pilots, aircrafts, simulators, training department who knows how to turn CFI’s into 121 pilots. Oh, they’ll have to pay for that move (no more regional pay scale gap?), and they’ll take on more risk, but desperate times will require desperate measures. That’s if the hype you all are claiming on the shortage becomes a real thing.

I remember sitting in my Aviation class, first day of college back in the Fall of 2011 hearing our professors push the shortage hype, “oh it’s coming”, 10 years later “it’s coming”, well we’ll see.

I’d be thrilled to see my seniority number jump 10-25% with a massive regional buyout by UAL, it would also give me confidence with job security. But I’m still skeptical on the hype.

the shortage was here in the late 2010s and is back again. You can see this in pay rates and bonus offerings. It absolutely happened and is happening.

https://i.ibb.co/71r0wJn/D02-CC5-E3-...22-C6-F521.jpg

https://www.realclearpolitics.com

Or, we could be heading for another lost decade with $200 oil, a depressed economy, and the bottom third of the major seniority lists furloughed. It’s a cyclical business and recession and stagflation has happened before. That’s life. You pay your money and take your chances…

It is crazy and it’s going to look crazy. The problem is that an operationally independent 121 carrier needs captains and line check airmen. If those a grown from within, they need a good contingent of people with 4+ years experience. Doesn’t matter how many FO’s you hire, lose half your captains and it’s game over.

the 50 seat carriers will go first. Air whiskey is my bet, as both PSA and the rest of the world lures their pilots. Probably will start seeing “$50 per 121 hour logged” type signing bonuses

A really devious major move would be to buy a couple small regionals and just shut them down to flood the market temporarily, but it could happen organically as well

Yup, and I’d be the first furloughed and last called back at a company with a management department that seems to love the idea of being on the heavy side of risk, which doesn’t bold well in an economy “pullback”.

Meanwhile, APC commentators are already convinced they’ll be hiring like crazy for the next decade.

The big three, UPS, and FDX could shrink and still need to hire due to retirements.

They are also afraid of not having the sim capacity to handle a future demand surge coinciding with known retirements so they may even be "investing" in pilots to avoid getting caught later, even if they have some uncertainty.

I work at the same regional as Erjpilot90. Our company has cut the schedule by 15-20% to accommodate more hiring and training. The result? Crappy, low-credit trips with lots of long airport sits and time-wasting deadheads. At least I'm in the turboprop, which has a minimum guarantee of 4.2 credit hours a day.

I am very optimistic about the future for those that are just starting their flying careers. My own 37-year career has been full of both triumphs and disappointments. I've seen numerous recessions, several pandemics (not just Covid), furloughs, airline consolidation, 9/11, and the change in the retirement age from 60 to 65 - all of which impacted my job. People starting their airline careers now should be prepared for the occasional career setback and have a positive attitude about it. No matter how bad things get, there's always something you can be doing to improve your qualifications and position yourself for a better job.

The most important advice I can give a newbie? No matter how much you like flying, it's still a JOB - a way to pay the rent and put food on the table.

Wells Fargo just announced they’re paying new hire employees starting pay of $21 per hour. While driving I saw an Ad for school bus drivers “pay $21-30 an hour”. I’d say inflation is working it’s magic.

Also the regionals should be aware they need to do better with pay, yet even now the “desperate” shops offer peanuts straight pay and a sucker bonus.

All that sounds great, but if we have a hyperinflation event, all bets are off the table.

Black swan events can have an impact. Anything minor will be obliterated with massive retirements this decade.

It would have to be massive to see a sustained impact.

Otherwise it looks to be a sustained very tight pilot marked.

I tend to agree.

This is sorta more than a pilot market event.


this is a “how many pilots can be sustainably harvested from the regionals” event.

The industry has had 30 years of bankruptcies and terror attacks and recessions and reg changes and finally now a pandemic keeping a lid on its fundamental staffing problem.

New hires aren’t really the problem. It’s keeping them around long enough to be captains and line check airmen. Four years is really an absolute minimum… which means that a 20,000 pilot industry can provide at most 5,000 hires per year. And that is if the hiring and getting-to-1000 and upgrade machine is humming.

But more likely hiring 5000 in a year … who will be mostly captains and LCA’s will collapse the system. Still 15,000 regional pilots but not the ones they need in the right place.

And hiring by the majors, LLCs, and freight dogs is forecast to be 9,000 to 10,000 next year. With forecast coming from the ex military and other pilots, the draw out of the regionals is estimated to be 7,000 this next year, and not all that much less annually in 2023 thru 2030. I agree with you this is not sustainable. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see some regionals will fail due to lack of pilots and the regional airline model will be in for a major restructuring.

I expect the bottom tier regionals to really pick up the E3 Aussie and other work visa hiring (if they could).

Seems like the perfect hiring profile for HR- not eligible for Majors and most LCCs so will likely upgrade and stay as Captain, while grateful to escape and be flying a regional jet that would have 3000hrs and 5 moon landing minimums back home.

The problem is, though, that they are losing their captains. They can get all of the new hires they want, but it won't help. They need pilots with 1000+ 121 TPIC time and ready to upgrade. Those will all be at the majors.

Yesterday in my mail there was a flyer for Pizza Hut and starting driver pay was $20-$25 depending on day or night shift. My first airline job I made $18 bucks an hour. Crazy

What does this mean for corporate pilots trying to get hired at the majors and ULCC? Will we see a higher percentage of corporate and 135 pilots in classes since hiring them doesn't jeopardize airlines' regional feeds, or are the number of them that apply too small to make a difference?

Not all 135 and corporate pilots want to be airline pilots. I only made the switch when the starting airline pay came up enough to justify the jump. Depending on the 135 or 91 job there are a lot of upsides to include schedules, corporate credit cards, rental cars, nice hotels, ball games, etc (there actually are really good operators out there).

Most people hiring regional pilots have an incentive to jeopardize regional feeds and even DL/AA/UA have an incentive to hose their competitors.

But everyone is looking for talent - I suspect 91/135 backgrounds will get more attention. And I suspect 91/135 pilots will be much more interested if interviews are plentiful and rapid seniority progression is a given.

The problem with those cush 91/135 gigs is that they’re great until they’re gone. Owners die, decide to sell the plane and go with Flex or Netjets instead, etc. And when that happens, there’s no government scheme to save your job like you’ll get at the airlines.

And those unicorn 91/135 gigs are the extreme minority, anyway. Unless you’re someone who genuinely enjoys wandering the country for weeks at a time with little predictability and (let’s get real) no family, the airlines are gonna be better than the vast majority of 135 gigs.

Had a good friend with his *dream* part 91 job. Flying a great airplane around the world for a great client. Pay was amazing.

The client's wife lost her passport in Austria, and when landing back in the states, they got delayed by Immigration because she didn't have her passport. She said that she had given it to the pilot and it must be his fault (which was not true). All of the pilots got fired and they were all replaced with more "dependable" pilots. Have heard similar stories about pilots getting fired because they had a bird strike on final causing damage to the airplane.

That is the reality of being a corporate pilot. You are completely expendable.

Airlines vs not, twin vs single, catholic vs protestant

if airline jobs get “better” there will be a flow of talent toward 121. 2022 looks to be an easy time to get hired and will probably be the front of a wave.

Cute story.

On the contrary I know Pt91 corporate pilots who have wrecked the bosses Falcon being dumb. He punished them by buying a Global Express and giving pay raises.

Also there is the stigma, how many 121 pilots were turned down in covid or before simply because they were 121 or had an airline background. Those people sit on hiring boards and dont forget. This is the unfortunate downside.

Important concept:

91/135 has to be considered in the context of a career in that industry, ie your job is probably not your career. Anecdotal stories about unicorn jobs are not informative of YOUR career.

A 121 job is also usually your career for almost all majors, so once you get there you can relax. Since there's nothing you can do about war, recession, pandemic, etc no point in worrying too much. Worst case, you'll get recalled in a few years.