80+ per month from a pilot group of nearly 4600? That's what? 1.7% per month? Compass is losing about 20 a month from a pilot group of 650, which is about 3% per month, but they are starting to catch up with that attrition by filling with their $17.5K hiring bonus. In the short run, it would not surprise me if Skywest does the same thing, because in the short run that'll probably work, and you simply are not going to be able to offer enough to keep those people who are currently leaving when they are instead offered an FO job at Spirit or Frontier or JetBlue where they can make more as a second or third year FO than they will make as a five year captain at Skywest. Those people are gone, and good luck to them as they move on in their careers.

The challenge that all regional managements need to face is how to keep the pipeline full with quality applicants, because if we aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel yet in new hire candidates, we are certainly beginning to at least SEE the bottom of that barrel, and that is being reflected in higher washout(or at least wash back) rates in training, which is not an insignificant expense.

But getting new hires in the door is only part of the problem, because unless you make the prospect of them becoming a Skywest captain more economically viable, you will still lose them to the LCCs once they have a thousand hours of SIC, if it's going to be economically more advantageous for them to move on and upgrade to Captain in the LCC, albeit a few years later.

And we haven't even hit the crest of the age forced retirements in the legacy airlines, which won't happen until 2022-23, although the numbers will continue to increase until then.

So unless there is a major recession,a war, or another 9/11 (God forbid) the current mental model that management has been using for decades, that there surely must be LEGIONS of aspiring airline pilots out there that would LOVE to come work cheap, is going to come crashing down around their heads.

Unless they change that mindset, a lot of regionals are going to find their work forces collapse like soap bubbles (Great Lakes airlines, RIP) as staffing woes due to inadequate replacements causes quality of life to deteriorate to the point for those remaining that they too look elsewhere, where they WILL be in demand by managements that are more enlightened.

Short term, classes can be kept filled by hiring bonuses and treating newbie trainees better, and with increased training you may even get MOST of these people to the line, but long term - and by long term I mean less than a year - if management can't provide a better QOL for senior FOs and junior (non-lifer) captains, it is going to get grim. That's my prediction anyway.

Whether management has the good sense to see past their historical model to today's reality is anyone's guess.

Personally, I'm out of here if they try and push another 1% a year then try to convince us it's industry leading.

If you have your PIC, why wait?

If not, a lateral move would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Although Spirit is hiring FO's, and that's not lateral.

What’s throwing a wrench is company breaking the law.
Edit. Re: email notifications for short call outside a rap.

Prepare to be astonished then.

QOL improvements would have to be coupled with hiring/retaining more pilots. That won’t happen in this industry right now.. how many more pilots would we need to guarantee 15 days off a month??? 10% more?? Who knows. Even if we match the other two. Attrition will stay high. Pilots market right now...

They should be happy they have been able to run off a bunch of lifers, (reduce crew cost) a bunch more to go.
Spirit 2-3yr F/O pay equal to 20yr SKYWEST capt.

I'd actually be curious to see...of the recently-departed pilots, how many of them were in, say, the top 25% of the company? Where'd that "Gone" listing go? It used to be on the old SAPA forums and was always interesting.

^^^^^^^^^

Well, considering that the pilot group just voted in a SAPA VP who is former management, and is about as hard-line a 'company man' as it's possible to be, all I can say is: we get what we deserve. RJ and JB at the top of SAPA? CC and MT must be laughing their tails off at how gullible a pilot group we are.

DM still posts it every month. It’s up on the new SAPA forums and the Facebook group.