Next week we'll know how few they are going to upgrade.

I would speculate that for people that just got hired upgrade will be closer to 10 years.

That would be my guess as well. We have an absolutely insignificant number of retirements for the next 10 years


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I think it's almost impossible to determine what the upgrade times will be moving forward. Looking past 2020 for instance...JB will probably be flying under their first CBA, they may or may not merge with another airline, and the retirements over at the Legacies really hit their peak, which will increase attrition. It could be 6 months, 6 years or 16 years.

I would also assume an industry standard CBA will drive a bunch of hiring. (Think normal vacation staffing)

If the estimates for increased staffing being thrown around (400-500) to cover for a CBA are correct, we're looking at the equivalent of 2-3 years of recent hiring just to cover that. That would be around a 10-15% increase in pilots.

Who came up with those estimates? Sounds like fake news.

Those are numbers that have been mentioned on here and bluepilots.com (may it rest in peace). They're not official. No one i know has any hard data on this or is willing to share.

But, we can use Frontier as an example, which has a similar aircraft utilization rate as we do. According to airlinepilotcentral.com they have 1,140 pilots for 65 total airframe, for 17.5 pilots per plane. We staff roughly 14.8 pilots per plane. That's a difference of 2.7 pilots per plane between the two airlines.

Spirit has 16.5 pilots per plane for a difference of 1.7 pilots.

With our fleet size of 227, those differences represent 612 and 385 pilots, respectively.

This is by no means a scientific analysis, but I wanted to demonstrate how those numbers aren't unrealistic for increased staffing requirements based upon a new contract.

Im also not saying Frontier and Spirit are in our peer set, they just happened to fly only our type of aircraft and allowed me to do simple math on the crew van.

We won't know how new work rules could affect staffing requirements until we see a TA. We also don't know how the fleet review or pending international expansion decision will play out and affect staffing needs too. Until then, we've got this place to speculate on the future and discuss the industry.

I was by no means trying to spread fake news, just want to have a friendly discussion.

It's difficult to compare. Staffing may not need to change at all if they build more productive trips. Look at pilots per plane for Southwest for example. Or Alaska. Both less than us.

701 is correct.

SWA doesn't fly nearly the back side hours we do either. I don't know about AK.

in 2012 we needed about 12% just to get standard vacation numbers. REF PCRB 1 then PCRB 2, and there were two or three reports before those done by the values guys.

It's amazing how many of our guys simply don't take a break.