Originally Posted by kfahmi

Pardon the dumb beginner question, folks. As you can tell I'm a total noob to the 121 industry.

But my question is: What's stopping the majors from bringing all regional flying in-house? In most cases they already own or lease the aircraft being flown by their regional partners (Skywest being a bit of an exception, in that they own quite a lot of their fleet.) So they've already got the airplanes, the gates, the routes, etc. The pax wouldn't notice a difference; they already book their tickets on the mainlines, and I'd guess that most of them haven't a clue whether they're actually flying on Mesa, or GoJets, or what have you.

Anyhow, it seems that if the majors were to take back all the aircraft and flying, and simply tell pilots, "OK, if you want to hire on with us, you have to go fly turboprops and RJs for X number of years at a reduced pay scale. Then once you've done that, you can join the mainline crews at the mainline pay scale."

Such a move would not affect existing pilots at the majors, because all the current regional guys would be brought in below the most junior current pilot at a major. It would solve the regional pilot 'shortage' in a heartbeat. And just think of the cost savings to the majors, who now don't have to spend all this time bidding routes to any regional who will take it.

Such a move would also help regional pilots, because now they'd all have a guaranteed career progression. I bet that'd dramatically reduce attrition in the regionals. And it's not like the majors would have to demand further pay cuts; they could keep their costs flat, simply by bringing in the regional guys at their current pay rates.

t seems to me that if an airline can just do away with thousands of retiree pensions (UAL, for example...and AA is trying to do the same)...then such a move would be relatively easy for it to make.

I'm clearly missing something obvious. I just don't know what it is