Atlasvet

I believe this assessment is spot on. The Training Center will be busy shuffling the deck chairs for 6 months or so, we could be back in the hiring game next fall or so what with lead times and all.

CaptHook

I was on the 777 August class and got an email yesterday saying that they are unable to confirm my CJO and the class date. It also say that they will provide additional information in the coming weeks.

Back to square zero.

Seahawk75

Just got the same email. My class was 5 August on the 747.

Cleared4appch

So are they rescinding CJO’s?

SealingStemBolt

I mean, the "C" does stand for "conditional"...

Birdsmash

Sorry to hear about the cancelled classes. Hopefully, once the chaos of the upcoming downgrades, displacements, and transitions clears itself we will be hiring again. I don’t see that happening until at least the end of the year.

Cleared4appch

I know that, but didn’t know if they were officially canceling classes for people or just putting everything on hold until further notice.

C17B74

Hopefully the later, but no one knows until the verdict is out and you're in training or worse yet finished on the line fully operational. The rumors and fact will be hard to discern until then and hopefully not anything like the recent UPS pool dump/resurrection when a new application process was introduced- who saw that coming, many didn't based on reading that debacle on their forums.

*The retraining push seems to be strong so maybe it will be a lot faster than later next year or whatever the current projection actually is.

mrvmo

First FedEx dumped most of their Amazon stuff, then UPS dumps most of their Amazon stuff.....now Altas is dumping theirs. Kinda tells me this Amazon stuff really isn't worth the trouble for the pennys and headaches that companies endure for flying their stuff around. I wonder why other companies even bid on this flying with the rapid turnover it has had with previous companies. Clearly it doesn't seem to be worth it.

Reactivity

Rapid turnover? Pennies and headaches?

Amazon went full bore on this project in 2016 (maybe late 2015). That's a solid eight years using the services of three airlines (and really only two companies, Atlas and ATSG) to fly their widebodies. Atlas is the first to exit that business. (Technically, I suppose ABX got exited first, but only because leases expired. But now we're back, baby!) For the last few years, Amazon has been using Atlas and Sun Country to fly its 737s, and Sun Country is looking to do more to keep their pilots busy while their passenger business is slack. I'm not seeing a lot of rapid turnover there, and clearly, somebody thinks it's business worth having. ATSG is a company that doesn't spend a penny without the promise of a return on that money, and here we are more than two years before our amendable date with a CBA that has been extended through the length of the new CMI agreement with Amazon. The additional business must be worth the expenditure.

Apparently, your new overlords at Atlas have decided that the Amazon business is not sufficiently profitable for them to keep it. I can imagine any number of other airlines for which that would also be true. We can be sure that Amazon is not paying top dollar to anyone, and I'm sure that includes Hawaiian. I think it's also possible that given the current state of the industry, where hiring and retaining pilots in the ACMI segment is a difficult prospect, your overlords have also determined that long-haul in the larger airframes is where the money is at, and so it's better to focus your limited pilot resources on the segment of the business that has larger margins. That is, after all, what Kalitta did not long ago when they exited the medium widebody business.

Maybe if ATSG was in the long-haul business, they would not think that the Amazon business is worth it. But as it happens, medium widebodies are the bulk of ATSG's business, and so they are structured in such a way that they are able to make enough money to be worth the effort. The fact that Atlas management doesn't consider the business to be profitable enough should not be taken as an indication that no other company can be profitable with it.