That article is a joke.

Southwest is losing new hires right and left. Frontier and Spirit are treading water and can’t grow.

United and Delta are growing as fast as possible. United is getting 138 new jets this year and much more in 2024.

The pool is empty. Regionals will collapse and ULCC cannot grow and will have trouble not shrinking.

$150,000 DE captain at Air Wisconsin. If that’s not desperation, I don’t know what is.

Maybe by June Envoy will be offering $500,000 for a direct entry captain.

There’s plenty of pilots. Just not enough with pic. Over time this bottleneck gets solved. It’s still the ripple from the covid shutdown.

Not enough with enough 121 hours to upgrade who are WILLING to upgrade at the regional level when they can jump to a major. That may be a temporary issue, but for many regionals it still might be a terminal one. Temporary problems can become permanent ones. Try putting a plastic bag over your head - just for 10 minutes or so - and SS how that works out.*

*No, don’t really. Not even a pangolin’s metabolism could survive that, tough as the little buggers are. But you get the point. There are fixed costs to running an airline that don’t cease just because one part (albeit an essential one) is in short supply. Many regionals won’t have the ability to endure a significantly sustained interruption in that supply

Yep regionals are going to shrink considerably. Right now a CFI can easily go to Breeze, Frontier, Spirit and others and just skip having to fly for the regionals. I don’t even think the flow thru carrot is all that enticing anymore since it still requires a pretty lengthy time commitment. ULCCs will become the new “regional” carriers like in the rest of the world.

You have a great point. And it’s airlines that can handle the fixed costs that will survive.

I laugh at your lengthy commitment comment. Because people trying to get out of the regionals have been trying for years. 4-5 years to get tons major when you start at 21 is nothing. When I first tried to get to the airlines nobody under 35 was taken by a major (excepting some MAC or SAC pilots). Times have changed.

There aren’t plenty of pilots. Maybe 10-12k at regionals. Spirit and Frontier are hiring 1k each, Delta, United, Southwest and AA want to hire 2k each. That’s 10k pilots by the end of the year.

As Ross Perot said (about something entirely different), “That Giant Sucking Sound”.

It makes zero sense for any pilot with 1500 hours to go to a regional.

Straight to Spirit then a legacy.

Is spirit really at the 1475 and fog a mirror stage?