Delta hasn’t hired since June and will have one class next week. We took only 2 months off. That information is through October, so counting in 4 classes in Nov/Dec at about 40 per, that gives us 600 new hires on the year plus furlough returns. Delta has hired 532 and runs classes about 30-45 iirc, so they’ll end up with about 570 this year plus no returns.

American

UAL

Scroll down to retirement numbers. American has eaten our lunch cause they have a huge wave of B Scale hires hitting retirement. It certainly isn't due to growth or foresight of some pilot crunch. The combined UAL pilot group includes the 570 and Lorenzo's Scabs where a lot will go beyond 35 year careers. Odds are we won't be touching American in hiring for a long time.

We are growing mainline WAY faster than DAL, AMR, or SWA. However, thanks to Tilton and Smisek, we were WAYY down in the hole. I thoroughly enjoyed watching our stock plunge as we announced our aggressive growth plan and Wall Street freaked out... only to watch it soar as they figure out it’s actually working.

Since 2011 65 more mainline aircraft of which there is a net 33 more in the top pay band. 11,107 (11/18) - 10,188 (11/13) = 919 more active pilots than five years ago.

United will hire/recall nearly 700 pilots in 2018 with April & May being the only two months with no hiring.

SWA & Air Tran only hired 200 pilots in 2.5 years after their deal closed.

Nope

Yep

Hilarious, but don't quit your day job.

Yeah, you too tough guy. :cool:

Funny how you selectively edit my quote to leave out the part where I say:

"You do remember we stopped hiring basically from March to Sept, with a few add classes in between?"

Nice edit. Do you work for NBC news?

Also, over the last 5 years, United has had a lot more retirements than DL, SWA, or AA. It's true that now retirements at the combined AA will now start to eclipse UAL for the next decade, but we're talking about what we've seen recently.

According to this data on this website it looks like we've stayed on par with AA and SWA (if you don't factor in UALs increased retirement numbers), but DL has crushed everyone almost by a factor of 2. SWA and DL have had meager retirements in the last 5 years, AA has had close, but not quite as many as UAL in the last 5 years. I don't see retirement numbers on that website. If its' listed there, I can't find it.

Although I can't prove it, I'm confident if you could see the hires/retired net gain over the past 5 years, then SWA and AA would have higher numbers than UAL.

Don't let that start stopping you.

Nice intelligent response. Prove me wrong.

It’s a simple fact that UAL mainline capacity is growing faster than DAL, AMR, or SWA. By quite a bit.

You’re looking at “pilot hiring” as “growth”. They aren’t the same thing. We didn’t hire much the last few years because we were fat on pilots and the new administration wanted us to get leaner: same number of pilots doing more flying. It appears by the rapidly accelerating hiring that we have reached that target. As of now; we have over 175 narrowbody aircraft inbound with no stated plans for any of them being replacement. Same for several more 787’s. That’s by design, as a change in the economy will certainly bring about older aircraft being sold or lease returned.

If I’ve learned anything in my 25 years here it’s that I don’t put one ounce of belief in any “growth plans”. Any airline pilot at any airline should feel the same. I’ve watched them announce 100 aircraft parkings in a single day.... more than once.

I'm sure retirement numbers used to be on APC, but I can't get the search here to look further back than a year, but I did find a post over at flightinfo.com that had United, CAL, DL/NWA, and AA numbers on it.

https://forums.flightinfo.com/showth...ry+retirements

Based on this data, which was posted back in 2010, I can only look at United vs DL, because the US Air and SWA numbers aren't posted there.

Also, the USAir hiring numbers aren't posted on that other database posted earlier.

So, if you just look at DL since 2013 until 2017 (since 2018 isn't over yet)

The numbers come out to:

Net gain in pilots
UAL DAL
2013 -20 -139
2014 -48 +677
2015 +485 +680
2016 +84 +876
2017 +353 +696

That makes the total for the past 5 years where United has gained a net of +353 pilots and DL has gained a net of +2790 pilots.

And yes, there were furloughs that returned at United that would obviously taint the United data and reduce hiring, but at the time,2013, all but a few CAL furloughs were back on property, and probably at least a third (guestimate) of United furloughs were already back on property, possibly more. So even if you give United an extra 1000 pilots to account for furlough returns, you still have DL doubling the "growth" of United over the past 5 years.

I guess it all depends on your definition of growth. For you focusing on you and you only, you’ve chosen the pilot lost as your only metric. There’s life outside of that, though, and Photo gives you a pretty good example I’d be interested in seeing you tackle.