It is the doom of old men to try and stay relevant.

Holy necropost Batman!

Perfect, Necropost, so perfect.

But in the end COVID19 finally ends this thread. Older folks will still be hanging around I guess while the youngsters could very well be on the streets. Some are already there unfortunately. Either way, it will be a long time before the world will see the great opportunities of yesteryear in this industry.
Sad, very sad. Let the chips fall where they may and drive on.

That article reminds me of the ones pushing NAFTA. Only difference, pilots didn't have a prophet like Ross. If we did, I'm sure he would have been equally ignored.

I started this thread with that article, I knew it was too good to be true. Every time the industry leans towards a "pilot shortage" something negative always happens. I remember in high school reading that Delta's hiring would top in 2007 when they would hire 1,200 pilots that year. This was written before 9/11. We all know what happened with 9/11 and 2008 GFC in the lost decade.

And remember the past several years we all looked at retirement charts alone (let alone growth) and everyone talked about the massive hiring spree of 2020-2025. Well, Covid is here and 2020-2025 are shot. I fully expect that IATA's prediction will hold true, that a full recovery to 2019 levels won't be until 2024. This 2020 decade will be another "lost" decade.

I kinda of agree, but........this was a 100 year event that NO ONE EVER could have imagined, that has messed up the whole world economically, not just our industry, and not just the US.

Sure, I could have predicted a regular recession with demand dropping off as what happened in the early 80's and 90's, but we are talking about a catastrophic world event that has literally affected every single person on the planet in some way, shape or form.

In a nutshell, a 10 year event absolutely could have been imagined, a 100 year event like COVID, absolutely not.

The epidemiologists have been shouting from the roofs that a pandemic was a virtual certainty for years—remember Ebola, SARS, MERS, various flu outbreaks, 1918-19, 1957, 1962. More severe than the public and politicians expected and overreacted to, but not unexpected.

Absolutely!
Heck....NetFlicks had a series on it that foretold this exact scenario, which is why it is amazing they seem so unprepared for the event.

But none of those outbreaks (except 1918) practically shut down our entire country for weeks on end and cost $10-15 trillion, while costing 200K lives. Sure, they were serious....of course, but not even on the same order of magnitude as COVID.


But not a single nation anywhere in the world was prepared, not just us. Maybeeeee Taiwan, S Korea, or Japan, but other than that......not a single one.

In 1957, US population was half its present and that flu outbreak killed 110,000 before a quickly fielded vaccine stopped it. It was every bit as scary as today’s, but without the panic attack this one has been. No social media, no unreasonable expectation that life was safe.