It’s a growth airline. They are growing and they do like and plan for some attrition for the reasons you mentioned. Problem is they aren’t growing at the rate they need to to fly the new airplanes they pushed back during covid. That’s why they are losing money. They attempted to train their way out of it and have reached max training capacity and still cannot staff for the growth. They are out of options except for massive raises or a black swan event. I’d anticipate the 319s getting parked as option three before any meaningful progress in negotiations. The only management group that is more anti pilot is at frontier.

I’m not arguing for or against the general idea of that. It was the sole statement half the people we hired already left. Which isn’t really true since those that are leaving are from multiple years of service not just new hires. The other way to look at it is we hired twice as many people that have left which is growth. Don’t have long term data but losing 2 captains this past month. How many did we upgrade? I’m sure we hired more fos than left and upgraded more captains than left.

What’s the current size of the pilot group?

I think they can train their way out of an fo shortage but it doesn’t help in the short term. They hired nearly 3 times the number that left. With the training delays and lack of experience getting a new fo to the line and ready to fly though does have its delays even with a net gain. Personally don’t think the attrition looks that bad but the situation calls for a reduction in attrition to grow and increase utilization. Training their way out may take a couple years to get to the level they need to by itself.

Couple years from now we will look like a regional… low time FO new hire won’t have the company qualifications to upgrade.

Couple years from now that most likely will be irrelevant as I'm sure JB has different qualifications for upgrading. If the merger isn't approved, then yes, I 100% agree Spirit will start having issues with qualified upgrade candidates and they'll have to adjust minimums. As was/is the case with Sun Country.

Most of the legacies are backlogged. When they start up new hire training again at the beginning of the year, the floodgates will open.

Yep - I think so too. Especially if a TA isn't agreed upon at that point.

Are you suggesting it’s be worse than what this year already showed? Year to date spirit has hired twice as many as those that left. If anything I think hiring will be higher than precovid but you’ll start to see it slow and come to an equilibrium as Covid recovery is achieved and they focus on replacing retirees and growth. Just because they’ve slowed hiring for now doesn’t mean it’ll be averaged in Jan when compared to last Jan.

Which legacy is backlogged? American united and delta have classes weekly all full

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