Originally Posted by
dr dre
You can’t displace into SH during a RIN. There needs to be slots advertised to bid for.
There are no new 737 orders on the books. Apart from a handful of over 65s the vast majority of 737 pilots are well away from retirement age. There’s going to be no long haul positions to bid for for a long time. So roughly the same amount of 737 pilots will be needed in the mid term future as are needed today, and no big numbers are going to be leaving. So no large number of slots means almost no significant opportunity for LH pilots to go to SH.
Not now. There’s always a cost with training and administration to have extra pilots on the 737, away from their optimal 68ish hr divisor. Management have indicated they want no unnecessary spend so there’s no financial incentive to retrain more to SH to keep divisors low. There’s training triggers that have to be met too.
You're not factoring in that the 747 RIN has to happen sooner or later, and I would be willing to lay a bet that there will be manufactured slots on the 737 magically appearing at the same time. You mention training costs - training costs will be incurred regardless.
That might just happen to be the same time that all current 737 pilots are back flying. It won't matter whether the divisor is 73/month as per the IA, the Company only needs to "forecast" such a divisor to meet the requirements of the IA. According to them. That's what they did during the GFC and they got away with it.