Originally Posted by Excargodog

look, we get it. You got lured into starting down this path by promises of quick progression, decent pay even in the regionals, and fast progression to the majors. And that was even happening - at the time. But that time was an artifact, caused by the belief that COVID was going to cause years of decreases in 121 flying. That belief lead to a number of companies offering early retirement to those within three or four years of mandatory retirement and those people taking that retirement. But that wasn't exactly how COVID played out. Instead you had rather unprecedented movement in the 121 world that lead to all that movement, sustained briefly by the fact that - yeah, a lot of boomers are retiring. But it wasn't a steady state situation. Ever hear of 'reversion to the mean'?

Reversion to the mean, is a statistical phenomenon where extreme values tend to move closer to the average or mean over time. And the historic mean is that - unless you were military trained - you were likely to require 6-8 thousand hours of flying time, at least a thousand of that TPIC and multiengine, a four year college degree, and a pretty clean training record to snag an interview at a major, and probably 3000 TT and 1000 ME to be competitive at most regionals.

Now I doubt that it will get quite that slow again over the short run - not unless we get age 67 retirement anyway, but right now there are the additional problems at Boeing and supply chain problems at Airbus and - oh yeah, two major engine manufacturers that have a lot of engine warranted work to do for COVID supply related mistakes, so a lot of planned expansion (and replacement of older and less efficient aircraft) is on hold.

The point is, you are probably not going to see the sort of rapid career progression you saw three or four years ago for another few decades - if ever. You need to adjust your career expectations. Nobody is going to get by with just the minimum qualifications unless you just married the CEOs kid. It just isn't going to happen.

Originally Posted by Cujo665

once the Airbus-Boeing-Pratt-and CFM LEAP engine issues get resolved you'll see a noticeable uptick in hiring again at all the legacies and LCC's. All of them have lots of planes down for engine MX issues and back orders on deliveries. It should go back to the pre Covid 2018-2019 levels which is pretty good. Depending which airline we're talking about, there 4-8 more years of increased hiring. Then after that, I agree with you, that it will be decades before another huge hiring wave. The reality is though that even then it will still be better than the lost decade where there was no hiring at all.