Ravenwing

Didn’t management first try hiring DECs, offering bonuses to upgrade, and award captain in any base people were willing to upgrade to even when there weren’t vacancies? They also begged their partners to slow down hiring their captains and offered guaranteed interviews to anyone who stuck around for two years and didn’t call in sick more than three times. Sure it would be great if they found better solutions than forcing upgrades, but I don’t think I would call that nothing.

Round Luggage

Your timeline is off. A year ago they had grown this airline to the biggest it had ever been. Six months ago it was only 100 pilots off that.

Str8 Cash Homie

Go look at the “gone list” from a year ago. November 2021 was the last month we lost less than 100 captains (82). Every month after until present we’ve lost an average of 140-150 captains each month.

This will continue for years. We won’t hit 150 every month. But our year average will probably be north of 100 a month. It’s literally unsustainable. Their decision to force upgrades is the same as placing a bandaid over a gunshot wound.

cactus1549

Understandably, if you're a senior FO who's being forced to upgrade, it sucks. But let's look at it from the POV of the company: if out of the 400 upgrade-eligible FO's, 20% leave or fail and the others upgrade, OO gets another 320 Captains and looses 80 FOs (who can be instantly "replaced" with new hires, although of course you can't replace their experience). Isn't this a good thing for the company to help redress the CA/FO imbalance? Even if 50% of the forced upgrades leave, it still seems like a good deal for the Company. Can someone who has access to the updated CA/FO numbers post them?

Excargodog

It isn’t punishment - it’s just math. This is an existential issue for OO.

Every FO flight hour REQUIRES one CA flight hour. Those who can’t (or won’t) upgrade are consuming a flight hour that could be used to get an FO who MIGHT be willing to upgrade eligible to upgrade. When they had more FOs wanting to upgrade than they had CA spots for, OO could afford to let FOs continue to consume those CA hours generating SIC time above 1000 hours. They don’t have that luxury now with a lot fewer CAs than FOs. It’s fish or cut bait time.

There are 15,000 jobs at risk and air service to a couple hundred cities. It isn’t punishment - just math. Emotionally it may suck, but other options have been exhausted.

Excargodog

Water under the bridge.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda

You can’t go back in time even if OO management could have competed successfully against the majors for hiring those people (which since they WORK FOR those same legacies they can’t), they would have still lost CAs and CA-eligible FOs to the LCCs and ULCCs. Today is today and this is the best option they currently have to keep OO from joining the legions of regionals that are now extinct.

Excargodog

Are you actually familiar with that crisis? With the so-called NINJA (NoIncomeNoJobNoAssets) loans that the government was forcing the banks and mortgage companies to make in the name of social equity? Do you even know what a collateralized mortgage obligation is?

The American people got the policies of the politicians that they voted into office. Same thing this time. We will be paying for a generation - perhaps longer - for the political over-reaction to COVID.

if you want to play the blame game instead of dealing with reality, at least blame the right people.

Turbosina

Drama much? The existence of the company is not at risk. You know how many hundreds of millions of dollars OO has in the bank? Worst case, we shrink some more. But to claim that the company's very existence is threatened, is a claim that's utterly divorced from reality. Let me guess... You work in SGU?

bamike

The company is unprofitable at the present number of block hours. They can’t just “shrink more” while covering their fixed costs and their debt payments. Same is going on at Mesa, even worse. SkyWest needs to fly a certain number of block hours to avoid losing cash every quarter and actually break even. Right now they are operating at a loss and have negative free cash flow. So he is not exaggerating that if this continues they will be facing major downsizing at a minimum including selling aircraft and firing people. Too many aircraft are parked and they cost the company money every month.

Str8 Cash Homie

Lmao this would be an easier discussion on a 3 hour flight from the flight deck but yeah I’m familiar with the crisis. NINJA loans is comparable to SPAC evaluations a year and half ago. A company made up from scratch with zero assets and just an idea and some side investors being pumped to $10 billion+ market caps. In hindsight those loans were just a sign of massive froth in the real estate market, or the “the tip of the iceberg”.

The housing crisis started when Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995. It just all came to fruition in 2008. The collapse of bonds with “overly-optimistic” ratings had Wall Street bankers names all over it. Who was manipulating the rating agencies? Selling highly inflated bonds as AA that were junk and should have been rated at BB or worse. On record they have representatives from Goldman Sachs who knew they were packaging toxic mortgage debt into securities and selling them off as A or better. They knew it would all blow up eventually, but greed.

The big banks absolutely played a pivotal role in what led to the 2008 financial housing crisis.

Also, I love how you always try to turn everything argumentative. I wasn’t even challenging your original post and you start going off on a dIck measuring contest about who has more knowledge on the 08 crisis. I’m sure you have a wealth of knowledge you’re willing to share with us buddy.

BTW I’m not going back and forth with you all day on this topic so don’t bother. SGU management is absolutely to blame for destroying our QOL by running this place into the ground with its inability to adapt. They’ve sat idle for almost a year. Would you expect the same response from a crew during an emergency situation? “Not our fault someone placed highly flammable materials in the Aft Cargo Bay”, right? “I guess we’ll just hang out and continue on to Atlanta while everyone gets toasted in the back”.

QOL has slowly deteriorated in the left seat, and their only solution is to ruin it for the men and women in the right seat via forced upgrades. What happens after December when the attrition continues from the left seat and they have nobody left to fill the hole?