none or very little if any capacity growth. 00 picked up some stuff from Alaska/Horizon, put probably lost a bit somewhere else. If anything, shrinkage. Just a shifting of the pilots and lots of attrition. Re-shuffling etc....Some, but not much in retirements.

 

Unfortunately the two carriers who added the most planes, Eagle with almost 50 cr7's and Colgan with their 30 Q's , are not doing so well. Skywest added a few, as did Compass. Expressjet pulled some from the desert. Unsure on the rest.

 

added aircraft over what period of time? The past 0-2 years or the past 5 years? Was it just shifting aircraft around? Some aircraft are always being added or brought in from the desert wasteland as older aircraft fall dead.

 

I don't see any significant pay raises coming any time soon. Maybe a couple thousand dollar bump on first and second year pay... that's it. The airlines will try to get away with paying what they are paying as long as they can. Also, rising oil prices doesn't mean anything good for us pilots.

I can't predict the future, but if things stay the way they are trending now, there will be fewer pilots down the road. Is it enough to trigger a bona fide shortage? I don't know. There are fewer students now than there was 5-10 years ago. With avgas being $6/gallon and loans near impossible to get (unless you are attending a university) flight training is out of reach for a lot of people. This is a double-edged sword, though, because fewer students means that it is going to be tougher for pilots to get up to those ATP mins to get hired by airlines in the first place.

 

Will the regionals pay better after next year? Yes. All of your wildest dreams will come true.

 

I'm sure there is a point where contracting regionals doesn't make financial sense for the mainline carriers. If pay goes up, and/or supply of pilots declines then I could see more routes going back to mainline. The infamous pilot shortage (if it ever happens) will cause the regionals to go extinct.

 

and my ex-wife will let me voluntarily lower my spousal support. One of my wildest dreams.........

 

 

This is true. The minimums were lowered to the FAR minimums because of the pilot shortage. It already happened. We're just too naive and optimistic to realize that it already happened, and the results were not what we were expecting. There might be another one in the future, but overall wages will not increase. There just might be a raise to new hire pay at the lowest level (regionals).

 

Yeah, I would say that 2006-2007 was a shortage by at least some definition. As mentioned I believe compensation was raised, but with new hire bonuses, not increased pay for the pilot group. I really think the economy needs to roar (or bubble depending on how you see things) to get the crazy hiring of 2006-2007. My two cents.