Devil's Advocate: Aren't there 3 legacy carriers that have 10,000 applicants to divvy up, each wanting to hire several hundred a year? With several hundred retiring each year? Oh, plus SWA, Jet Blue, Spirit, Frontier, the fractionals and foreign carriers?

And despite all this, we maintain our 10,000 pilot applicant pool. So new people keep applying, etc. I'll bet we are adding people to the pool of applicants at the same rate or greater that we remove them from interviews.

United, AA, Delta, SWA won't have pilot shortages. It will be the other airlines.

Pilots don't decide where to go based on 1st year pay. They look at the overall picture.

United needs to double the number of pilots hired. 700/year isn't enough.

We are rapidly approaching a point where regional flying will be completely unreliable due to their manning issues. Time to replace 2 RJs with one mainline NB.

But I don't expect increased hiring to dwindle the list of qualified pilots much because there will be plenty of new applications. And I'm willing to bet that 10,000 is a very low estimate of current applications on file.

Edit: I just noticed that Endeavor Air and SkyWest are advertising on this website for FOs with signing bonuses. Sweet. That should accelerate the retirement of RJs.

Ya'll are also forgettin, maybe those on the bottom of the 10,000 applications stack, we really don't want to hire....smaller pool than you think.

When does that become a concern? When the stack's down to 3000 applications?
Even after years of constant hiring, the stack was still at more than 10,000 when 9/11 happened.

Congestion was always a plus for RJ's. Not for us, or the pax, but for the company and reduced competition. You can't compete if you can't get a slot.

As an expat contract pilot, the number one question the FO's had was:

"how do I get a job overseas, especially America".

There are 10's of thousands of foreign pilots that would apply to work for us and Delta for our current 1st year pay rates. Uncle Sammy just needs to issue the green cards. They WON't come here to make 19 dollars an hour at Mesa. But 60 bucks an hour is a pay raise for most of them. Some of the dodgier airlines pay Captains that.

There will be no pilot shortage any time soon.

If I were UAL, I would be hiring Delta Connection pilots as fast as I could. And vice versa. The express carriers are hosed.

Agree. United will never have a pilot shortage. It'll be every other flying operation out there, because they'll all leave those other jobs to be a pilot at a United.

Doesn't matter how many applications we have or don't have. If that stack gets below 3,000 word will get out and the apps will come in. Right now how many qualified pilots don't even apply because they figure it is a waste of time?

That was before the ATP/1,500-hour rule bottlenecked the training pipeline.

I know where we can get 50+used 757s for free and we wouldn't have to even repaint them.

But what would we do with all the money we saved doing that?

Shut down your APU and do not question Sabre.