I hate to tell you that you can blame the Delta Pilots for that. They established the industry standard. The 50 seat limit was effectively gone at that point.

 

Word! That is exactly what Linda Puchala told us to our faces. "If you want a DELTA contract, the company gets 76 seats same as DELTA.


.........

 

He said jets. Not gonna put a q400 on YYZ to IAH


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Worse, CAL was flying -8’s EWR-IAD.

 

Bad decisions abound. Obviously the dash 8 wasn’t a good fit. Truthfully the q400 is a nice airplane. Mgmt had their eye on replacing 737-300,500 flying. It didn’t work out long term probably because it didn’t have to...contract 2012


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I sense impending thread drift


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You can blame contract 2012 all you want but there was NO way you were going to stuff the genie back into the bottle. UAL got 70 seaters shoved down their throats during bankruptcy. The 70 seaters came with the merger it had nothing to do with money. In fact contract 2012 held the scope line which was/is a positive.

 

Filler......

 

To put it back on topic, and to compare with delta hiring numbers since that’s the comp metric, this ute increase data actually validates some things. Can’t remember the specific numbers, but wasn’t it around 400 new hires and returnees in cy17? I will argue given that the furlough returns are full time employees, and with the new mil hires being predominantly the retiring type instead of the younger AFRC/ANG obligation type, we get a little better productivity on the bodies we put in class than delta does. And with this 500 pilot equivalent Ute increase, we’re in the same ballpark.

Got a friend at delta who says they are actually about to slow down hiring soon. Union guy and connected to interviewing so I believe it carries some weight. Says they are fat in a lot of categories and up to 14.5k pilots now. They called me for a class in 2016, I’d have come on board around #13100 so that’s some pretty solid list expansion in 2 yrs time!

Us otoh, I think premium will be off the charts this summer for narrowbodies.

 

So much for hiring more pilots......

A total increase of just 39 pilots??? Great to see the growth, way to dominate the market.