Sliceback

For the group as a whole percentages matter. What major airline pilots corps has grown 20% recently? That would be like the Big 3 hiring 3,000 pilots a year right now. The growth is big numbers, requires a lot of simulators, staff, hardware, etc, but it's a smaller impact than the growth of the 1980's. The airlines doubled in size in a decade. That's like the 10-12,000 pilot corps of 2014 have 20-24,000 pilots today. They're at 16,000. Having 1,000 guys junior to you in a 5,000 pilot airline is 20%. That's great protection. Having 1,000 below you in a 16,000 pilot airline is 6%. The saving grace in that is you can count the future 1-2 years of retirements as 'furloughs' and suddenly the 1,000 becomes 2,500 +/- which is approx. 15%. Historically minimum furloughs tended to be about 5% and big furloughs were around 15%.

Excargodog

But by the same token, multi type fleets make it more difficult to furlough.

In a single type fleet like WN or AS, it's pretty straightforward. you can just trim at the bottom. Yeah, you may need to displace a few CAs but they are going back to the other seat in an aircraft they are currently flying, not to a different type altogether. Multi type fleets have sort of a domino effect. You wind up switching types and perhaps bases even for the people you keep with the resultant delays, training demands and training costs. Especially at the top (WB) payscale aircraft where you might have three FOs per CA, with at least two of them senior to many of the NB CAs.

You incur huge training costs in the downgrades while keeping your most expensive pilots. Even if you wind up getting all your junior pilots back (and you won't) it doesn't save you anywhere near the average salary per pilot. And that's even more the case for UA where upgrades are being given in intro. How many aircraft do you park trying to fill all the junior CA vacancies. How much does it cost you in displacements to do it? In many cases it'll be far cheaper to just give senior people VIL or early retirement.

And as you mentioned - retirements. Those don't peak for UA until 2027 and stay up in the 600s for 3 years after that. So yeah, nobody wants a black swan event to occur, but barring Greta Thunberg becoming Empress of the World, I think the new hires are going to do OK.

flyforfun1

FWIW, it looks like Southwest is also slowing hiring for near year. They hired about 2000 this year and are shooting for 900 in 2024. Has anyone seen United's most recent hiring projections for 2024? I saw a post in the New Hire thread that they're still running about one indoc class per week, but no description of how large those classes will be.

KnightNight

You sure they hit 2000? Thought it was more like 800 from a thread I saw but could be wrong.

They said 2000 this year at United so probably same size classes as this past year 🏄🏻‍♂️

flyguy81

1813 new hires for 2023 (at least that’s how many are on the MSL who haven’t quit).

BlueScholar

And here's where that pesky context comes into play. SWA says they will reduce hiring, true. But SWA is also on the cusp of competetive contract, so if it passes they will lose less pilots to attrition, and therefore will need to hire less pilots.

As far as United goes I haven't heard any official changes to the ~2000 per year number the company is planning on for the forseeable future.

CLazarus

Another piece of context - to date WN has not received as many MAX aircraft as planned (no one has). I can't imagine WN leaning very far ahead of deliveries.

On the other hand, I can see why we might be leaning pretty far forward for a few more years. UAL still has a poop ton of mainline aircraft coming to cover what was previously RJ flying. Despite the recent hiring surge here, a lot of our new hires in the last 12-18 months have gone right to WB as our international network gets bigger than ever (even though we haven't added many WB aicraft, we've added a lot of double augmented flying since the pandemic ended - MNL, CPT, SYD #2, BNE, etc). That WB expansion is going to pause for a while until 787 deliveries start again in earnest this fall. I think upwards of 95% of new hires will be going to the Bus/737 from midyear forward to keep up with all those NB deliveries. When the delivery pace (or economy) eases off then perhaps our hiring will too.

Andy

Delta hired quite a few pilots starting in 2013; I think they had 3 or 4 years of big hiring numbers which was more than any other airline during that time.
United's aircraft order book is quite a bit larger than Delta.

Gone Flying

Delta started hiring again in January 2014, we hired about 1,000 in each 2014-2017, and about 400/year 2018-2020. From June 2021-November 2023 we have hired about 5400 pilots. Of the roughly 16,800 pilots on our list, about 11,000 have been hired in the last decade, while less than 5,000 were hired before 9/11 at either airline.

Andy

According to the last 10Q, United had 73 Maxes and 4 A321neos to be delivered in Q4. For 2024, United has 8 787s, 100 Maxes, and 26 A321neos for delivery.

Delta's 10Q didn't list deliveries by year and I haven't found any reliable information on their near term deliveries.

Given the 4Q2023 and 2024 deliveries at United, I don't see hiring slowing down.