I have picked up a few things around town to keep me occupied..I was just hoping to start with SKW sooner than later. I am itching to get back into an airplane.

Thanks for the info. Lets all hope the trend is upward.

I have two points I want to make. Central to both is I can't see how United can park 93 737s and not fill in the feed in with 700s and 170s.

First off, United says they make money on international flying. The question becomes can they make money on international by cutting a huge percentage of the domestic feed to fill it without replacement? What do you tell customers worldwide? "Sorry folks, we parked our 737s so no more service for you into/out of our hubs, but you can still fly in/out of our hub cities on someone else and get on our international or even our far fewer remaining domestic flights?" You will drive the precious international customers to AA, CO, DL/NW, and US who will allow them to travel where they need to go with the least amount of hassle.

Second of all on the issue of people buying tickets, if Unites takes away options to best fit people's schedule, they look to a different airline where the options better fit their needs. People who need to get somewhere by X time buy on schedule regardless of price. Those are the people United wants to fill seats with and the only way you get them is to not cut their options. Leisure travelers buy on price so get rid of 1/2 a Guppy's worth of them and leave the higher paying people to fill an RJ. I can't see United giving away that many customers to other airlines by getting rid of options. I see RJs flying a lot more of the mid day flights to cities leaving the mainliners to do the very high demand early morning flights as well as the high demand connect to the international flights in the afternoon with the RJs doing the evening flights.

We are getting a bunch of new 700s that are going to be based in LAX. We use a lot of of our 700s here in ORD to go west. Once we start taking delivery of those new planes, I would not be surprised/really hoping to see the 700s we have here start heading east to some other new cities-- a la BOS, BWI, LGA as the 737s start getting parked. This is all assuming we are not going to end up parking 200s as the 700s come online. Either way, being a guy at the bottom of the list in Chicago, I want to see as much flying as possible coming our way!

"Someone" told me some mechanics and sim/check pilots have been doing acceptance checks and flight with Mesa 900's. More fuel to the rumor mill, FWIW.

United scope doesn't allow any 900 flying....

You are assuming the 900s would be flown for United....

what about expansion to lax domicile, any rumors

The new 700's are supposed to be LAX/West Coast based.

This thread is funny. About once a month there is a new thread asking about SkyWest, the answer is no but then everyone starts speculating and of course, it is the same speculation for the last 3 years.... SkyWest is going to take Mesa's flying in PHX, get Dash 8s, contract with Southwest... I've heard them all.

SkyWest won't be hiring for a long time, maybe more than a year. They have a huge pool and my guess is 99% of them will take the job without any hesitation. No one in the pool has any idea when, or if, they will be called to groundschool. There are about 60 that were given a class date, but then had it cancelled. The top 20 Brasilia class was given only a 3 days notice of the cancellation.

SkyWest has offered some of their pilots leave of absences so you can assume they are overstaffed right now. So far, they have not furloughed which is a good thing but doesn't mean they are out of danger of having to do it. They lost flying with Midwest and it resulted in them being overstaffed with CRJ pilots.

They are taking delivery of 700s starting in Dec. Some claim that there is flying for this new aircraft, others say they are still working on it.

I think it will take new flying before the training department is fired up again. Attrition isn't happening fast enough to make a difference.

Oddly, they are still accepting applications and I have even seen recruiting ads on some of the aviation job websites. I think it is worth putting in an application to let them know you are interested but don't expect an interview or job any time soon.

In the last month the list has shrunk by 9 numbers.

how can they be doing those checks when pinnacle is flying them right now?