Thise statements at the end from the airline CEOs. Utter gigantic lies. Delta for instance, "not having any issues at kur regionals"? They're paying obscene amounts of sign-on and retention bonuses well into 6 figures at their wholly owned reginals having already doubled their starting pay not only hiring direct entry captains but those very very low hours pilots they are hiring also. At delta's wholly owned regional they pay the cost of putting them thru very expensive cadet style sim training programs thru CAE and then put them in class as soon as they hit 1500 hours. To say they're green behind the ears is a ridiculous understatement. Have you ever heard of inbound and outbound spoilers? I have with my own ears.
American had their director of HR give an auditorium talk 6 months ago in Dallas headquarters. He talked about how they need to hire 2000 pilots a year for the next few years. How the training department has never done more than close to 1000/yr in the past and they've been tasked with analyzing what they can accomplish to ramp up and how soon and at what cost and how they don't know how this can possibly be accomplished. Then He was asked how many pilot applications they have on file. He answered 12,000+. And he immediately followed up by saying " but out of those, only 2000-3000 meet our minimum hiring standards". (A friend who was in the audience showed me a phone recording of this."). That's 2000-3000 pilots they can call for an interview. Even if they hire every single interviewee, do the math how quickly they'll run out. Lowering standards, paying major sign-on bonuses to poach from other majors, re-caliberting fleets (bigger airplanes/less frequencies) are among what they can do to make ends meet with less than needed pilots.
American just admitted they have 100 regional jets grounded due to no pilots. And the delta guys says "we have no problem... ". They pay the same obscene amounts of bonuses and doubled salaries to attract. I'm only saying obscene because of comparison to what was paid before.
Why do you think united just signed a new contract with the highest pilot pay in the industry? Because they see no problem attracting pilots for their existing demand?
Prediction is that unless another major event such as 9/11 ,covid , economical crash etc intervenes, most US regionals will have to shut down due to no pilots. Hiring foreign pilots has proven to be a pipe dream also. It takes very very long to process an application and there's no guarantee of approval anyway.
Sh!tty airlines such as sh!tblue, frontier, spirit, alaska will be next.
ALL US airlines are sh!tting their pants about the pilot shortage, as they were just before covid hit. Covid gave them breathing space to do something. They offered early retirements and lost a further 10,000 pilots. Short sighted incompetent Idiots. Hearing CEOs lie is exactly what's to be expected, about this or any other issue.
They can ingenously say the ongoing high amounts of cancellatuons at the big majors is due to their lack of training capacity, which is true for now. United has pretty much stopped hiring to let their training department catch up. But it can only be lied about for so long. What is happening at the lower scales of the industry (100 aircraft grounded due to no pilots at just one major's regional) will creep up to the higher scales. Sooner than later. It's already happening sporadically and they've been covering it up. As it gets bigger they won't be able to. You can already see it for yourself. There are an unusually high number of aircraft parked idle outside major airlines maintenance hangers not being worked on... and not flying either. I see this with my own eyes. It's not normal. Where there used to be 2-3 airplanes in for mx, there's now 6 with only 3 being worked on. And the same airlines are pulling out of some routes due to "lack of capacity".
There will never be a shortage of pilots, for the airlines which pay the best/most compensation package. You get what you pay for.
This shortage of pilots crippling the US airlines is the direct result of what theyve done for the last 20+ years paying peanuts low enough to qualify their first officers for food stamps, to offer the pax low low priced tickets. Every year less people entered this profession because of that. Now it's going to cost them not only much more than they think they saved back then, but also it will cost the existence of several of them, hopefully. It's well deserved.
I'm also impatiently waiting for cathay's demise due to not being able to crew it's aircraft due to shortage of pilots and the loss of its safety record & reputation caused by replacing experienced pilots with inexperienced cheaper pilots.