It may take UAL a decade to retire that many, but it only take 3 for the US industry to retire that many. Those are the same applicants on file everywhere.

Having been in a regional uniform not that long ago, and confident that there are many very well qualified candidates in the regional ranks, I couldn't disagree more with your "this doesn't seem close to necessary yet" thought.

Put yourself in the airline's position - first, of the 15,000 regional pilots you mention and considering, let's say, a 10 year window, some pilots from that group are going to be hired elsewhere, some will be too near retirement, others won't want to make the transition and still others will be not particularly hirable for various reasons. Either way, any graph of required vs available pilots (worldwide) starts to look pretty alarming in the not too distant future. There are a lot of companies (and militaries) looking for pilots and they're all in competition to varying degrees.

As the airline, is it worth ramping up several potential sources of future pilots to continue to exact some control over quality and quantity needed, or is it better to just wing it and worry about it later, or take what's left of the remaining pilots applying? If I were making those decisions (and thank goodness I'm not lol) I'd want to start at least the framework for a few different means of obtaining pilots of the desired quality, and if more or fewer are needed over the long run, well, the rate can be adjusted through the size of the program.

From a line pilot perspective, my big hope and expectation is whatever the source, which will surely continue to include plenty of regional pilots, I just want quality pilots and quality people.

If they really want to be proactive, they could hire all 15,000 (or however many are hireable) right now and screw their competition.

you do realize that would bankrupt the company before it even came close to hurting the competition, if it were even feasible?

Being on the panel was probably the hardest/ most work of the three positions in the cockpit.

As someone working on their PPL I would love to join this program. But for some reason I feel it will be damn near impossible to get hired...

Obviously that wouldn't be practical, I just meant it as a joke.

I agree it was a lot of work and daunting at first. It was a completely different, yet trainable position from what we were used to.

Where does Lufthansa place their new hires originating from the training academy? Do they place bidding restrictions on them until certain levels of experience have been attained?

Lufthansa new hires either go to Lufthansa, Lufthansa Cityliner, Air Dolomiti, Eurowings, or Germanwings, depending on needs of the company.

Perhaps they don't want to take more pilots away from their already severely understaffed regionals. Taking the pilots straight from this school prevents a further shortage at the regional partner and decreases overall training costs (replacement of selected regional captain to United and replacement of upgraded FO) vs creating another opening at the school.

Just a thought.