Will the Regionals be around in 10 years?
 

I've heard a lot of pilots saying that in the next 5-10 years, the regional airlines will shrink and eventually go away. Do you believe this is true?

Lord willing...

I hope they won't be around.

Hopefully not

..........

20,000 mainline retirements in the next decade. That's more than the current number of regional pilots.

Something's gotta give.


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Doesn't that argument miss the fact that new pilots will be trained up during the next decade to replace current regional pilots? I get that perhaps not enough new pilots will be there to replace all the regional pilots that will be needed, but you can't just assume that regionals will disappear based on mainline retirements.

Yes, and they will still be underpaid.

Not only will they be around, but you can see exactly what the pay will be in 10 years, because of the glorious round of 10-year contracts with concessionary pay caps and miniscule raises that don't match inflation.
We live in a country of 350 million people. The major airlines will hire half from the military, which means they will need to hire about 80/month from the regionals. You don't think the regionals can find 80 young folks a month across this entire country that want to be airline pilots? They can. They could find them in a single ATP flight school.
This is all fine with ALPA, because they see themselves as advancing "the industry" and not pilots specifically. So they will continue to fail regional pilots on a massive scale and use them to subsidize senior lifestyles at the majors, which gives new pilots a dangling carrot to shoot for in 30 years.
Movement will be good throughout the industry (a good thing), until the next major stagnation event, regulatory change, or technological change.

Business works on money and incentive. The only way regional airlines will ever disappear is if the cost incentive that makes them so attractive to the Doug Parkers disappears, ie regional pay rises significantly to the point that outsourcing is not worth it. But right now the mainline/regional cost incentive differential isn't disappearing, it's exponentially growing. Is it really so hard to see that the next chip to fall is scope? One way or another, it will.

There will always be smaller destinations that the legacy airlines don't want to service...thus, there will always be regionals/commuters.

They may not be RJ-flying FFD outfits that outsource the bottom end of a lot of the flying that the majors used to do...but they will still exist in one form or another.