Looks like SWA is canceling/deferring/postponing all new hire classes and upgrades UFN. Bad news always drops on Friday...

 

It seems like the new hire class and upgrade class in February will still take place. Everything that was planned after that, so March 1st on, is cancelled. Not a good news, but I would be extremely surprised to find a single person who wasn't expecting that. Stagnation in the middle of the biggest hiring wave in the industry! What a mess...

 

February classes are going as planned. Classes from March through June deferred. Anyone already scheduled for March was given an opportunity to move up to February.

9 max sims on property by June.

 

Hmm...today on the virtual fair the SWA rep said the window is opening on 24 Feb for new applications...that seems opposite of 'they are canceling everything'

 

The window will open and they will continue to interview for a pool. As said before the wildcard is when and how fast the MAX comes back. We can go from over staffed to under staffed very quickly.

 

This might have been before they made a decision about freezing all classes. Or they may slowly interview for classes after the MAX is recertified. Either way we all got an internal memo just an hour ago. It's the latest, so scratch all you know from before.

 

They’ll lose people from the pool pretty quickly with everyone else hiring. I would also expect attrition from the bottom as pilots who have been there for less than a year or two bail out. Interviewing to backfill that attrition is probably smart.


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But wait, there's more!

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/busin...fpNBb2ySBXMuGY

 

My uninformed opinion is we pushed those classes back to clear space for the impending MAX training. FAA has said it expects certification before the middle of the year and it sounds like SWA wants to train everybody at once over the course of a couple months, as opposed to a metered base by base training cycle. The purchase of 3 additional MAX sims supports that. Sucks big time for folks who have class dates and interviews because we will no doubt lose some excellent people, but this saga REALLY needs to come to an end and if it takes a brute force approach to accomplish that then so be it. Good luck to all.

 

Nobody really knows yet what's going to be required in the MAX training. We could be running classes until the training program is established and then freeze classes, or reduce the volume. We'll still have plenty available simulators that are not MAXes available for new hire, upgrade and recurrent training.​​​ I think the reason to stop classes is simply they are sick and tired of everyone complaining how over staffed we are. It also comes down to how much they're paying for those green bars and extra reserves sitting at home. I think they finally realized the MAX is definitely not coming any time soon. And even if this time Boeing's prediction to fix it by the middle of the year is right (they lost their credibility long time ago), we have more than enough people to fly the extra airplanes already, so why hiring more?