AirBear

https://www.businessinsider.com/unit...ortage-2021-12

This was testimony in a Senate Hearing, reps from several major airlines all said basically the same thing. Scott Kirby said they need to train 5000 pilots by the end of the decade.

threeighteen

Maybe if he hadn't fired all of ExpressJet including their hundreds of lifers he wouldn't be in such a crunch.

JoeMerchant

THIS^^^^^

Kirby created this mess…No sympathy…

TangoIndiaMike1

Didn’t United play whip saw with the other Regionals that left us to try and lower pay rates while every other regional was raising pay?

IamEssential

oops, sucks to be him I guess since this is a direct result of his decisions. Maybe he should tell his board that.

flynd94

No he didn’t. The horrible mgmt at Xjet caused the problem. The fighting between the 2 pilot groups and YOU caused the problem

JoeMerchant

Wrong! Kirby thought he could take advantage of the situation and replace XJT with much cheaper C5. He was wrong.

skblu

Are there actually 100 RJ’s parked that weren’t slated for retirement? Seems like posturing for more government support.

Allegheny

This is a duplicate post from a thread on the Major's section:

I have no sympathy for Scott Kirby or anyone else who complains about the supply of pilots. This situation is a monster of their own creation. The entire concept of the RJ was to break mainline scope and lower costs. I started in the industry when the RJ did not exist. The industry was incredibly successful in its quest. They beat down wages to just about starvation level. 10 to 15 years ago I saw Mesa pilots with boards attached to the roll-along bags. "What are those for", I asked. "For sleeping in the airplane" they replied. Jonathan Ornstein was reported to have said to new hire classes; "Just sit there shut-up and look good, your not worth anything anyway". Why would any reasonable person spend money effort and time in an quest for a career that treats you in that manner.

On another but similar vein we are suffering from a "supply chain" crisis. When I was in college in the 70's there was no such animal to be studied as a supply chain. Logistics was a military concept. FedEx, conceived by Fred Smith, was barley beyond the concept of his masters thesis. From that time on, the manufacturing capability of the United States was demolished and shipped overseas. Thousands and thousands of jobs lost and communities abandoned. When there is a glitch in the newly created "just in time" supply chain, the news is full of "What happened?, Why is this happening? And of course, whose at fault? Simple you morons, if you take apart the productive capacity of the United States, ship it overseas and then have a glitch in the supply chain it will have major consequences. We we no longer make things. Things arrive from Asia by ship, then go on to trains and trucks.

No one wants to be a trucker. It doesn't pay that great considering the hours you put in. https://www.transwest.com/trucks/blo...truck-drivers/

These are all economic Monsters, "Babdocks", of their own making. Spread sheet "quant" managers driven by the religious fanaticism to reduce costs and reduce workers to mere dots on a spreadsheet. Just wait until automated trucks and airplanes are a reality, it's coming faster then we might expect.

ZeroTT

kirby’s request to congress was for student loan support for pilot starts. Doesn’t seem like posturing