Just flew with an FO who had recently talked to AA HR.
They told him that in 2007 AA had 13,000 qualified resumes on file.
Now, in 2017, they had 3000 qualified resumes on file.

Elsewhere, I read that AA plans on hiring 1000 pilots this year, more in 2018, and more than that in 2019.

It'd be enlightening to hear directly from the airlines about how many "qualified" apps they have on file. "Qualified" would have to be defined for the number to mean anything. But...they'll never reveal that info.

Convention internet wisdom is that the frequently-mentioned 14,000 apps any particular airline is alleged to have on file are actually the same 14,000 on file at DL, UA, AA, SW, UPS and FE.

We'll never know.

I predict no empty seat will remain unfilled to the point financial damage to an airline occurs.

Delta has over 100 RJs during in the desert they are making lease payments on.

Cargo pilot (FedEx or UPS... He didn't say) said his own HR told him that they would run out of qualified applicants in about 2019.

If that's the case, the entertainment value alone would be absolutely priceless !

That word "qualified" keeps popping up. The thing that people are glossing over is that there at the FedEx/UPS/American level, a lot of applicants are deemed unqualified for a whole host of reasons which have nothing to do with their ability to fly an airplane safely and professionally. Anyone who has been paying attention to the UA airline employment scene for a while is aware that the "destination" airlines are completely swamped in applications, and their selection processes have evolved to include a lot of irrelevant criteria which exist solely to weed out applicants and reduce the numbers. An example is the requirement for a 4 year college degree. FedEx and UPS still require a degree. It's not a hard and fast requirement at American, but they generally do hire degree holders. A degree has nothing to do with whether one is "qualified" to fly an airplane, and I say that as someone who holds a 4 year degree, so it's not merely a case of sour grapes on my part. A few years ago I was observing a friend fill out an application for a major airline (American, I think) and one of the requirements was to submit a copy of their transcript from High School!!! Are you effin' kidding me??!! Requiring an adult with a decade or two of industry experience to be judged on their grades when they were a child in public school??? (Public school has a different meaning in the US than the UK) Can you think of something less relevant that your childhood school report? Point being, was that a large portion of the pilot selection process at the US major airlines was an inane beauty contest (not all of it, but significant portion) designed not to make important, relevant distinctions, but just to quickly cut down the overwhelming numbers of applications to a manageable pool. So, when an HR person at an airline like FedEx says we have X number of "qualified" applicants, they mean applicants which meet our list of hiring criteria, not applicants who are "qualified" in a real world sense. I can guarantee you that FedEx and UPS could dramatically expand their pool of "qualified" applicants by removing their requirements for a college degree and making it known that applicants without degrees would be given equal consideration.

To be clear, this isn't intended as a rant against the degree requirement, specifically. It's just a useful example of the "requirements" in the Major airline hiring process which are not requirements in any real sense, but artificially skews the perception of what it means when an HR dweeb at FedEx says that they have XXX "qualified" applicants.

Right. RJs. Those are the airplanes which Delta farms out to their regional partners. While the regional have made improvements recently, the pay and quality of life is still, for the most part, abysmal. Most of the pay numbers you hear tossed about include things like "hiring bonuses" which make the first years look more attractive, but don't constitute meaningful improvements to the pay scale across a career.

When Delta starts parking mainline aircraft, intended to be operated by Delta pilots, due to a lack of Delta pilots on the Delta seniority list, then there's a shortage. Until then, parking RJ's just means that there's a shortage of pilots willing to fly RJs for the crap wages and conditions that regionals offer.

This article about the coming pilot shortage...from 1989. Remarkably similar to 2017:

"The shortage, most apparent in other countries, is still a few years away in the United States, aviation experts say." [Is "...a few years..." almost 30 ?]


Pilots Scarce, Airlines See 30-Year-Olds as Captains - NYTimes.com