If the COMAIR and Colgan events had been widebodies the liability would have been $6B instead of $1B each (ballpark). That's getting to be real money.

 

Not at my airline. Mainline calls - captains go. To do otherwise is stupid. And they know it.

 

Back in the old days, TWA and PanAm used to hire pilots and sit them in the jump seat as a No stripe observer. Or so I have been told by CAs of the Charles Lindbergh era.

 

Yeah but now that the bandaid is on, how/when does it ever come off?

 

If they prop up the regional model with high pay in order to get through the retirement wave, they have a couple options to reel it back in when the time comes...

1. Wait until there's a pilot surplus (assuming that ever happens again), and then startup new regionals which attract young upwardly mobile time-builders with fast upgrade. The established regionals then have to accept concessions or lose their flying. Nothing new there, the regional death march road is littered with the corpses of Top Regionals which were put down.

2. Let inflation do it's work over time. Slower maybe, but gets there in the end.


That's if they bother to keep the regional industry intact, it's not even clear that's going to happen.

 

There's an issue with this. If you bring the regionals in house at a major, it will stop other regional CAs from going to that major. For example: Let's say AA brings PSA in house and staples them to the bottom of the seniority list. A CA at a different regional, maybe Republic is looking to move on to a major. They won't look at AA because they won't want to start at the bottom of the list below the CRJ guys. You'd have to give them some sort of seniority credit to make that remotely attractive. Scenario 2: Someone at the bottom of the CRJ list who was hired at PSA right before PSA joins AA. Option is to stay at PSA and ride the list up to where you want to be, which could take years, or jump to United where they can start in a bigger plane with a bigger schedule sooner and not be so far down the list. Obviously they likely would not stay. I don't see a solution to this problem unless you guarantee some sort of seniority portability, which seems unlikely. It's going to get messy, and airlines will have to either be creative in poaching other companies' pilots while keeping their own, or come to some sort of (illegal) backdoor agreement to stop the poaching altogether.

 

Fine by me. The idea that military guys have some god given right to waltz into a 777 needs to die. Some of us have spent years loyally flying the same customers as mainline. If my 76 seat jet is below your dignity, then go sell insurance! I'd rather fly with a 1,500 hour kid than a salty old colonel anyway...

 

The way around it would be a experience fence hiring situation. Similar to what we see at ACMI carriers. If you have a certain amount of hours/experience, that will allow someone to get hired directly into class to bid for a NB/WB slot but your global seniority number will still be based on DOH. Those with less experience will be hired into the RJ and seat locked for a specific period of time and will be eligible to bid off until seat lock expires and required experience to bid the NB/WB fleet is met and their global seniority will also be based off of DOH…

 

Someone else noted the concept of split classes. Certain people get invited to classes with only rj drops and others get invited to rj-free dates

 

It's not about having a "right" to do that, it's about recruiting... they know mil, especially retired mil, have other options in life. That issue has actually been diluted by the rise of big RJ's flying longer stages, it's not like the ten-leg turbo-prop days of yore (under 135 duty limits).