I hear a lot of speculation on flow, the hiring boom, etc, and I'm a numbers guy, so I wanted to see for myself:
I compiled all of the 'hiring' data from FAPA and the 'mandatory retirements' at the majors (AA, Delta, United, Fedex, UPS, SW, and Alaska). This data excludes LCCs that are projecting growth, like Spirit and Frontier because I couldn't find enough published trend data.
Airline Pilot Mandatory Retirements.jpg
I was an engineer before I did this, so I learned that anyone can compile data, but the real talent is using the data combined with reasonable unbiased assumptions to draw an accurate conclusion. If you're too conservative or too aggressive on your assumptions your conclusions will be worthless, and I've noticed pilots tend to be very cautious people. So here's what I found, and please feel free to call me out, add info, etc; I'm trying to figure out reality so I can plan my life, not BS around.
From APC I found that as of 2019 there are 21,519 pilots in the regionals (I adjusted PDT to 705 pilots) and roughly 15,000 pilots each in AA, Delta, and United.
This article gave some decent SA on military pilots:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ave-plummeted/
My take-away was that about 1/5 of the pilots under 40 are ex-military. 40-44 (20 year career) and it jumps to about 1/3, but any time before that was the Cold War era drawdown and that isn't good data for today. Currently all of the services are very undermanned for pilots, it will get much worse before it gets better, and the problem will persist for the foreseeable future. In summary, the majors are going to have to get the vast majority of their pilots from the regionals for the foreseeable future.
With that in mind, the number of retirements at the majors (AA, Delta, United, SW, Alaska, FedEx, UPS) will equal half of the current regional pilots by 2023 and all of the current regional pilots by 2027. This is unadjusted for military/corporate, early retirements, anyone who leaves the majors for reasons other than retirement, projected growth/shrink, LCCs like Spirit, Frontier, JetBlue, Allegiant, or any cargo except UPS and FedEx. So, as a rule of thumb it appears roughly all of the regional CAs now will be hired by 2023 and roughly all of the regional pilots will be hired by 2027, just based on these conservative numbers. Also, if you look at my graph it appears hiring is increasing disproportionately ahead of the retirements. I'm not sure if this is because people are retiring early, the airlines are trying to lead the shortage, there's a growing economy, a combination, or some other reason I haven't thought of.
Also, the average mandatory retirements at the majors through 2030 will be 3125/yr. According to FAPA, from Jan - Jul 2019 Spirit hired 105, JetBlue 283, Frontier for all of 2019 is hiring 300 (from APC), so that's roughly 1076 pilots in 2019 at companies that are all growing and have contracts/pay that are all decent enough to spend a career at. So if we assume the average number of pilots hired to a permanent airline is 4,200/yr for the foreseeable future, that means the average stay at a regional should be 5.1 years + whatever time is added for military non-regional pilots. It's almost as if AA built their regional business model around knowing this.
This also means that the regionals are going to have to recruit 4,200 pilots a year to stay in business. I'm not sure how many pilots are produced annually by all the civilian sources combined (Part 141, 91, ERAU, ATP, etc), but if they can't keep up with demand, scarcity plays to our advantage. That's where we might see faster movement to the majors and higher pay/QoL at the regional level, but that's purely speculation.
Since we are at the front of the hiring boom, the civilian training pipeline, and certainly the military pipeline, was likely not prepared to produce enough pilots, so that 5 years will likely compress even more. Right now it seems the majors are cherry picking a few guys a month who are OE instructors, spent thousands on interview prep, went to all the career fairs, etc (and good on them, I'm really happy their ambition and hard work paid off), but when guys start seeing average joes junior to them getting picked up by the majors, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a mass exodus. What I can't see happening is many people waiting 6 or 7 years on a flow while everyone junior to them is getting hired by the majors years ahead of them.