I looked at the seniority of the first few people who were bypassed for lack of PIC time on the latest pathway update. They would have needed to average less than 38 hours per month to be bypassed. So I averaged my hours and found out that I've averaged 35 hours per month since coming to Horizon.

So that would give you 4 years and 9 months to flow to Alaska.

What I wonder is to what extent is this going to slow the whole thing down once the people start to get the hours. It seems possible that a bunch of people will become eligible at the same time.

Anyone in the 5 year range has spent at least half of that time or more on reserve.

And once all of the now seniority elegible Pathway guys get their 1000 PIC, the goal post will be moved again.

The sim instructors are all getting hosed...The company will only credit them about 250-300 hours per year in the sim...reneging on the 5+ credits per day they promised them.

No surprise there. I can only imagine the bonus Hornibrook got for suckering pilots to QX with the Pathway program.

The net results of the time requirement just might be lots of pilots who end up not being at Horizon or Alaska. They can’t keep people someplace with time requirements.

None of the legacies have any difficulty finding well qualified applicants. The difficulty is keeping the regional's staffed. To the extent flow programs do that they are seen as a good thing by management. The slower they can manage to keep that flow the more they like it.

Below is a list of retirements by year at Alaska posted by someone on the Alaska forum. I thought it was relevant.





This is current as of the Aug 2019 seniority list:

Pilots on property: 3004

2019- 12 (5 have retired since Aug)
2020- 34
2021- 45
2022- 55
2023- 56
2024- 64
2025- 89
2026- 74
2027- 99
2028- 79
2029- 107

Total retirements in the next 10 years: 709
Seniority gain for a new hire today over the next 10 years: 23.6%
Total retirements in the next 5 years: 261
Seniority gain for a new hire today over the next 5 years: 8.6%

And it would be prudent to anticipate for career planning purposes that at least half of those slots will be filled with military or other OTS hires, not flow from Horizon. Barring growth at Alaska, it would be a slow slog. But even a 2% annual growth would increase pilots by 40 new hires a year.

Also, that's just retirement numbers. I have a few guys in a crash pad that are at AK that "said" they would jump ship to any of the big 3 plus Fedex/UPS. So as the retirement numbers increase for the larger pilot groups, scalping from smaller airlines will probably be standard practice.