More Culture Shortage Than Pilot Shortage
 

Based on my Air Force experience, here's my advice to managers and pilots in the regional airline game:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-vi...ot-chris-dupin

Short article, well written, many more layers of the onion to go. Nice job.


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Great post.

Regional management operates under the assumption that any warm body will do the job. What they fail to realize or appreciate is the return on investment for having a winning culture and happy/invested pilots.

How many times do disaffected pilots blow their entire day's pay worth of fuel by running "go home day" power settings? Pilots that are happy and appreciated can save the company a lot of money without sacrificing safety.

There is one key point that the article doesn't touch on, which is the distinction between the expected/desired time spent in the military and the regionals. Military wants just enough people to stay in to retirement (there is a shortage yet they are still forcing some fighter pilots out). The military shoots itself in the foot consistently with manning, but lifers are a key element to military manning. CEOs at regionals want turnover to be high at regionals. They don't want lifers. Lifers cost the company more money to do the same job, and they prevent movement and increase upgrade times. Our COO and the recruiter I talked to when I started at Mesa said as much...They wanted me in and then gone to bigger and better things in short order.

If management makes it just appealing enough to check career boxes (jet/captain experience), but not that great of a place to work, then people will come, regardless of the culture or pay, and hopefully not stay. Management will do the bare minimum financially to get meat in the seat. The lowest paying regional in the industry, Mesa, is still filling classes. It doesn't have a good reputation throughout the industry, the culture is okay, nothing great, but it is the movement and opportunity that brings people in. No one comes to Mesa saying "I like the culture." They come thinking they will upgrade quickly. Our last few classes still have a lot of people coming from other 121 carriers that have better pay and better cultures.

It is evident most regionals don't care who they hire in this environment. And that isn't just bottom feeders like Mesa, that is the case across the board. Sure culture will help reputation/word of mouth recruiting, and a bad culture will do the opposite in some cases (i.e. RAH). But it doesn't really matter to them. The culture metric just isn't important to bean counters and managers, because it doesn't really matter in the regional model.

And to the last paragraph re pilots trying to stick it to the man and burn more fuel...mainline buys our fuel. Sure my .82 vs .78 may burn a few hundred extra pounds, but regional flying contracts with mainline are hardly affected by fuel efficiency. Regional management likes to tout fuel savings, but I don't think they care. In Phoenix for example, they could hire more rampers at $10/hr to save 5-10 minutes per running CRJ that is waiting for marshallers, which happens several times a day. They routinely (at least at Mesa) wait until the last minute to fix MELd PACKS. I flew LAX-YEG-LAX-DEN one day at 240/250. That seems to happen a lot more than it should if they really cared about fuel savings.

There is no Pilot shortage. Just a Pilot-pay shortage........

Very true, but for the most part regional airlines don't buy their own fuel. At least not the one I'm at. It's all mainline ownded so running "go home" power, doest change the regional airlines direct expenses, and our normal cruise is basically the max we can should go anyway within .01-.02 if its super smooth. In fact a good chunk of our flights used to be filed at "go home power".

But I agree with what you are saying. Many other examples would work well too.

Yeah.... You can't really write a 100-page thesis on any of the social media sites.

I sit in the jumpseat over half the time to get to work, and I've never once seen the crew fly any kind of econ speed. I think that old trope is just what the mainline "partners" hit the regional management over the head with to justify not paying them more.

Bingo! The rest is irrelevant.

This is not true. While raising pay would help the regionals, there haven't been enough pilots training to replace those retiring and the people the regionals would take from 135 and 91 jobs. Big picture. I'm all for more money but actually believing that will 100% fix the problem is naive.