Sleepyhead
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2001
- Posts
- 320
Your numbers don't exactly add up, because you are looking at extremes. If you look back at past times of mass furloughs and recalls, you will see there has never been a case where 100% of hired furloughees returned to their airline. For example back in the 90s when AA recalled their furloughees only about 50% came back. The reasons people go back or not will vary, some have given up flying, others got jobs with the few companies that were hiring and have built up seniority so they stay where they are.
And the longer a furlough lasts, the less likely people go back.
I don't see anyone getting recalled in 2 years, since the bigs guys are still furloughing today.
Lets look at your example using a more realist number of 50%.
Airline A has 300 pilots, they increase the number by 25% over 2 years. That's an increase of 75 pilots, or on average 3 per month.
Now the economy gets turned around and the airlines start recalling. First of all, not all the furloughees hired are from the same airline and even if they were they are not all going to get recalled on the same day. Again, real world example, back in the 90s, AA didn't start recalls til 9 months after UAL did. And each only called about 100 per month because that is around the max their training dept can handle. So with current furlough numbers it would take both at least a year to recall everyone, and realisticly a lot longer than that. But lets say they recall everyone it in a year.
Then back to our example of Airline A. They hired 75 pilots, now half of them leave for recall over the next year, (37 pilots). That means Airline A will loose about 3 pilots per month. Do you think loosing 3 or 4 pilots a month is going to cause scheduling problems when airlines typically have 10% of their pilots on reserve? And if you say, "well training cost will be higher". , not really. The training dept doesn't shut down even if there is no hiring going on, so having a new hire class or two doesn't cost them much extra. And again back to the money, Airline A looses 8 pilots costing $640k and gets 8 new hires costing $240K. They save a bunch of money even after training cost.
Bottom line, management really doesn't have anything to lose by hiring furloughees. Ya, a small percent will go back when recalled, but most will stay. And don't you think they have a good reason why they are hiring a lot of furloughed pilots?
And the longer a furlough lasts, the less likely people go back.
I don't see anyone getting recalled in 2 years, since the bigs guys are still furloughing today.
Lets look at your example using a more realist number of 50%.
Airline A has 300 pilots, they increase the number by 25% over 2 years. That's an increase of 75 pilots, or on average 3 per month.
Now the economy gets turned around and the airlines start recalling. First of all, not all the furloughees hired are from the same airline and even if they were they are not all going to get recalled on the same day. Again, real world example, back in the 90s, AA didn't start recalls til 9 months after UAL did. And each only called about 100 per month because that is around the max their training dept can handle. So with current furlough numbers it would take both at least a year to recall everyone, and realisticly a lot longer than that. But lets say they recall everyone it in a year.
Then back to our example of Airline A. They hired 75 pilots, now half of them leave for recall over the next year, (37 pilots). That means Airline A will loose about 3 pilots per month. Do you think loosing 3 or 4 pilots a month is going to cause scheduling problems when airlines typically have 10% of their pilots on reserve? And if you say, "well training cost will be higher". , not really. The training dept doesn't shut down even if there is no hiring going on, so having a new hire class or two doesn't cost them much extra. And again back to the money, Airline A looses 8 pilots costing $640k and gets 8 new hires costing $240K. They save a bunch of money even after training cost.
Bottom line, management really doesn't have anything to lose by hiring furloughees. Ya, a small percent will go back when recalled, but most will stay. And don't you think they have a good reason why they are hiring a lot of furloughed pilots?
