-FlyAuburn-
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2007
- Posts
- 225
In hindsight it is easy to say that. Last year I didn't hear 1, NOT 1, single rumble about us hiring too many pilots from ANYONE. What the deal was last year was, "My buddy didn't get hired even tough I wrote him a LOR. He was the best out there. You don't have a clue what you are doing."
The bottom line is that NO ONE can say that someone dropped the ball or that someone should have stopped hiring, because NO ONE saw or was even CLOSE to seeing the DOW getting down to 7000. To say otherwise is horse $h!t. If you did in fact know, why weren't you and everyine else screaming at the tops of your lungs???
Because you didn't know how bad '09 was going to be. Again, NO ONE did.
From someone who was actually there during the hiring process, as you and I both were Fisch, you are absolutely correct. All I heard over and over again was things like ,"We are going to hire 450 a year until we reach 5000 pilots" and "We have 80 Hawker 4000s and hundreds of other aircraft coming and we won't be able to get you guys through training fast enough!". The ONLY uncertainty on everybody's minds during my April indoc class was whether or not OIL would go to 200 dollars a barrel and what effect that might have. I think at the time it was around 130/barrel? That was the ONLY negative aspect of the current economy that was being discussed by Management and Pilots alike.
Don't forget the Hangar meeting/video in May? I think, where RTS kept saying over and over again how we were going to "kill" the competition. He had absolute confidence and was a completely different man back then than he has been over the last 5 months.
These were VERY smart people folks, and if they didn't see it coming, then I'm pretty sure none of you self professed Nostradamuses saw it coming either.
NOBODY had a clue this was coming. To say otherwise is absolute bull$hit!!!!