I'm not sure if AAG can do that without APA'a approval since APA owns the seniority list.

I'm thinking they end up making 100% of the new hires come from the three WOs, that is basically the same thing and makes your new hire date at the regional your spot in line for AA. Envoy, PDT, and PSA will all grow as the contracts with other carriers expire or get canceled due to poor performance (RAH).

 

Seniority numbers?? AAG is gonna b!tch slap their wholly owned when it suits them. I would not feel good about being owned by American. When has it ever worked out for a WO'ed?

 

I highly doubt any airline would limit their hiring to a few carriers, especially if those carrieres provide them with feed. It would make much more sense to take pilots from a competitors feed instead of bleeding your own pool dry.

 

It keeps the cheap regionals staffed for as long as possible. You don't think they wouldn't have plenty of apps for the only route to AA? Just wait and see, it is just a step in the process of bringing everything back in house and eventually making it all mainline again. If you using the last 15 years as a measuring stick to the next 15 you are doing it wrong. The other majors will follow suit as well and eventually all new hires right out of college will still be flying large RJs/SNBs but for a major as regionals will no longer exist.

 

A pipe dream unless APA agrees to that and they have no incentive unless AAG intends to offer them something for it.

 

If you are assuming that subcontracted labor is a thing of the past, then you clearly don't have a firm grasp on economics. The cutouts already exist and there will always be downward cost pressure on the major carriers. Once the big retirement boom ends in 20 years, there will be stagnation again and there will be an abundance of pilots. Places like Mesa, Skywest and TSH will continue to make their owners oodles of cash by flying regional jets for cheap. If American limits themselves to just their wholly-owned, they will be missing out on thousands of extremely qualified pilots.

 

Sounds good on the surface, but expect any such carriers planes and pilots that AAG kicks to the curb would be put to good use by AA's competitors, in addition to agreements to protect their own core businesses feed operation. As a result, that plan has high risk of failure to achieve such an objective. Some talk about purposely hamstringing non-owned carriers to support owned ones and I think should AAG ever elect to deliberately sabotage the viability of non-owned carriers in favor of their in-house ones, I could see lawsuits flying all over the place.

The minute regional X gets a whiff of their feed contract not being renewed, they will aggressively sell themselves to someone else for too cheap to pass up, but that might mean more concessions from employees. That could be mitigated for pilots by flow agreements with the new contract legacy to protect their investment. Pretty soon, it won't be the poaching of pilots, but the poaching of carriers that are abandoned and the only legacy that some talk about playing favorites with or abandonment is AA and again, unless the 3 AA WO's can now reel in MORE than 50 pilots/month from the street (not poaching), the engine never gets the gas it needs to run as smooth as some think it will. Those pilots simply don't exist in the necessary numbers and the present shuffling of deck chairs (which is all that is occurring), isn't the gas needed for the future engine.

 

Save this post and revisit it again in a few years.

RAH, TSA, SKW and XJT were used as pawns for AA get to their cost where they want them in house at the WOs. That step is complete and it is on to the next one which will take some time. Just because it is not what "you" would do does not mean it is not what AAG is going to do.

 

AA, along with UAL and DAL, will purchase some regional airlines to prevent that from happening. The only question is who get bought and for what price, after the first one gets purchased it will be a domino effect eventually leading to just a handful of regionals that will all have a flow and career pipeline to their mainline owner. There will not be any path to get to a major that doesn't go through an RJ cockpit.

 

I disagree.

Purchasing a regional airline to protect your core operation isn't necessary and more akin to purchasing a car dealer to ensure the car you want next week is still there. What IS necessary is a competitive plan to protect the availability and viability of an increasingly scarce resource. Right now, Delta and United aren't suffering that much of a direct impact of AAG's flow-through to AA as not enough pilots are leaving their feeders to start at the bottom of PSA, PDT or Envoy. PSA and PDT are a trickle and Envoy claims to be overstaffed by 40%, not to mention loaded with hundreds of $120,000 year or more captains. RIGHT NOW, they can meet their goals.

IF AND WHEN direct impact to DAL and UAL becomes an issue, they are sure to react and stable contracts along with a competitive flow-through plan of their own would be enough. Once that occurs, the poaching issue becomes moot. The REAL problem is where to find hundreds of new-hire regional pilots will to work for peanuts and treated like whale **** each and every month. I'm confident most military aviators in the 28-40 range won't consider a regional as a necessary stepping stone to a legacy, unlike many 21-24 year old college kids or 2nd career warriors. Problem is, those pilots are a fraction of what will be required to run a smooth flow engine for ANY legacy.