Quote:
Originally Posted by CFIsoonToBeFO
Obviously you have not went thru many years at the airlines yet, nor a bankrutpcy yet. Every Major Airline has filed bankruptcy, and some more than once, and they will cut/kill your contract to shreds during the process. So either lower the mins, bring on more pilots, problem solved for awhile........or raise prices to where customers decide to drive vs fly all while you have to cancel flights due to no pilots (again making the customer choose to drive and not fly even more), the airlines loose revenue, airlines then decide to increasing wages to astronomical rates (which hey, pay raises are good), then they fill the seniorty list, then file bankruptcy like they always do and cut your wages to less than they are now.........The Airline Industry is a pendulum, it has happend before and will happen again.....Or just have Congress/FAA raise retirment age to 70 or 75 as long as you keep your 1st class medical. Enjoy being on reserve an extra 10 years.....without that widebody upgrade to CPT......The fact remains there are less and less students going to school to become a pilot due to the training cost....have the airlines bare some of these cost, that would benefit everyone....the company would secure a pilot before other airlines get ahold of him/her, and more students could afford to attend pilot school.
there were fewer and fewer taking up the profession; that’s true, but why? It’s because since deregulation the wages, retirements, and benefits associated with being an airline pilot continued to drop as managements kept whittling away at the job. Not so coincidentally at the same time the benefit of being an airline pilot started falling, so did the hours and experience to become one. Also linked was the number entering training to become one. This culminated around 2007 when an ink wet commercial pilot could go straight from a Cessna to a 76 passenger jet. That is also right near the point at which pay and benefits were around the lowest relative to costs of living putting many pilots on food stamps.
The initial pilot shortage was just a 2 year window as the supply had to build hours to 750/1000/1250 or 1500 to get hired now instead of 250. After that, each year there’d be new graduates entering he job market but with 750/1000/1250/1500 instead of 250.
The next shortage started in 2015 and was driven by a lack of pay attracting the plenty of ATP rated pilots into the entry level profession and suddenly we saw wages and work rules improving drastically over short periods. We are now at the point where we’re again waiting for the glut of people who have entered training to complete their training. The year graduates will be entering the profession at a great time in history. The current shortage now is entirely driven by retirement, expansion and mismanagement of training currency during the pandemic. There will be no shortage at all in another 7-8 years as expansion slows, training backlogs are cleared and massive blocks of retirees are replaced.
no extension to 70 or 75 is needed, and no reduction in experience levels are needed. As with the initial shortage due to poverty wages; the current shortage is mostly a training backlog again due to mismanagement.
filing bankruptcy and cutting pilot wages under these conditions would be corporate suicide. This isn’t the 80’s thru 2012. The planes don’t fly without pilots and they finally succeeded in choking off their own supply of pilots. Having to resort to hiring 250 hour kids should have been the red flag to them that it was to us. We’ve been telling them this would be the result and was coming.
03-21-2024
AIRLINE
