Here's my question about the MPL. I can see how management views it as a short term fix. So long as you've got qualified captains, you can basically put them up there single pilot with a gear-pulling monkey in the right seat and they'll get the job done, for a while... The problem arises when those captains retire or get sick of the workload. In the past, you moved from the panel to the right seat, and eventually over to the left. If you've got someone who can't hold an ATP sitting in the right seat, who is going to upgrade and replace the retiring captains?
Just like the rest of corporate America, airline managements can't see past this quarter's income statement...
Oh no, my friend, the MPL is a long-term fix. Let me explain.
Right now you have approximately 34,000 airline pilots in the workforce. Let's say half of those are F/O's (historically it's about 55-60%, but we'll err on the low side).
In the airlines, most pilots fly 700-900 hours a year, depending on how aggressively they fly (70 hours a month with 1 month of paid vacation spread out over a couple months means around 770 hours a year; most pilots fly more).
Let's also say that the MPL program doesn't happen conservatively for another 7 years, there's plenty of pilots on furlough to last through the next up-turn and down-turn, and the vast majority of the retirees won't hit the streets for at least another 3-5 years.
So say 3% of your workforce starts hitting retirement age each year starting in 7 years. That's a lot, by the way, over 1,000 pilots a year; it'll probably be a much smaller number. In 10 years, you'd have replaced only 1/3 of your senior pilot workforce.
So, each year you upgrade your high-time F/O's who have been swinging gear for 10-15 years in the majors, the regional CA's come over with lots of time, the guys who have been F/O's at regionals for those 5-7 years hit the left seat at their regional, and the 150-hour MPL wunderkids get hired in the right seat of that CRJ/ERJ.
That means a fresh MPL in the right seat of a CRJ is going to build 700-900 hours a year. 2 years and they meet ATP minimums and can upgrade at their regional. 2-3 years later they have 3,000-4,000+ hours and could conceivably have enough flight time to pipeline through to the majors (they've hired that low in the past, and would again if things got tight). That's only 5 years into the MPL replacement program, and those guys will spend another 5-10 years in the right seat at a major before they even see a HINT of upgrade, they'd have 10,000+ total time, almost all of it multi-crew jet time.
Not to mention about 15 years from now, we will have gotten through that big bump in retirements, and the pace will slow dramatically again, allowing slower hiring for a LONG time to come...
The MPL won't cause a restriction in the upgrade pipeline, there's far too many pilots already in the system and not enough pilots coming out to cause that problem. That's one of the reasons so many of us are trying to warn people about it. Things likely WILL get tight in about a decade, and that's going to be the last, good opportunity to improve this profession back to at least SOME semblance of what it was.
Miss that opportunity, and you will once and for all turn this into a blue collar job.
