PhilMcCrackin

Didnt mean to come over negative, just an observation while commuting. Off to airliners.net I go.

flyingmau5

That's a little obnoxious imho.

tcco94

I agree with some of this, Scoop… but not mentioned is that it’s cheaper to be understaffed to a point and hand out OT than to be over staffed. That applies for most industries as well. You mention 2014-2016 timeframes. It’s interesting because if you cross reference those 3 year timeframes from past (dating back to 1990), it’s exactly in 2014 where the philosophy changes with GS.

In 2014 until 2019, we start running about 5k per month average. Some months reaching 7k and some low months in 3-4k range. Prior to 2014 and dating back to 1990, we had a total of 8 months out of 276 that reached 4k and above (3%). From 2014-2019, we had 52 out of 72 months over 4k (72%) and 23 out of 72 were over 6k per month (31%)

my point being here when you look at this data you can tell something changed. Retirements from 2014-2019 we’re not in vast numbers we are seeing now and coming up. The philosophy changed, clearly, to staff the airline with OT. Now I could post 2021-2022 numbers, but that isn’t completely fair given the VEOP and hiring. But still, this year shattered the record per month average and total per month as high as multiple 17k GS months!!! All while the airline is destroying its competitive counterparts with profits and finances.

now as we look forward - the hiring is continuing to be at highs. But we still have a huge challenge in that retirements are coming worse now, seeing as we reduced the number from the VEOP, with about 450-550 continuing from 2024-2032. That’s around 4500 pilots over the next 9 years.

Finding the sweet spot of hiring, staffing, and perfect equilibrium of costs is going to be extremely difficult moving forward. Corporate does not care if we need 5000 GS a month, 10,000 gs, or even 18,000 GS a month. They simply do not care and proof is in numbers. Many people assume that the GS cost is too high and therefore chipping away at massive profits, yet as the GS data goes up, the profits hit records. Staffing the airline to stop the bleeding of GS does not simply make the airline more profitable, and could be argued it will cost more.

Of course as you said this industry is a seesaw. We will go up and down and sideways. We don’t know what 3 years or 5 years what staffing or fleet looks like. I don’t see the corporate mindset changing here unless we get a change of leadership. But as of now, the airline is doing a hell of a job printing out the money. I wouldn’t bank on all this hiring to be replacements of GS data. Certainly I don’t think 12-13k average is in their long projections. But I don’t think they want the same data from 1990’s or 2000’s either. I could totally see it being plausibly like it was in 2014/2015 timeframes with staffing.

PapaMike

As with everything in life the truth will probably be in the middle. The company knew they were short in summer 2019 and said they wanted to add about 800 pilots IIRC. ALPA said they needed over 1000. So, between VEOP and UNA we needed to train nearly 4000 pilots plus the 800+ we were short plus whatever growth entered the system plus LOA 20-04 (lower tlv) plus C2019's added pilots.

This was never possible to be a quick fix. They just didn't want to throttle back in the "catch-up" phase. It's obvious they plan on GS and SS and VAS and everything else will be utilized to the greatest extent possible but it wont be anything like it has been the last few years. Things are already throttling back as certain fleets get caught up. Now they will have to find the line on each fleet of where the happy place is with the new contract. There will probably be on and off again painful months along the way.

FangsF15

Keep in mind the size of Delta in 1990 was less than half what it is today. Really can't compare numbers that far back.

But the inflation point wasn't 2014. Even then, when the trend up a little, it's not all that much, especially if you exclude the summer spike. Where they DO spike 'bigly' is in the July/Aug 2019, right after they 'paused' hiring in the Fall of 2018 (when a certain VP came in and dialed the optimizer up to 11), and "saved" something like 600 pilot jobs with the turn of a knob.

They later admitted the summer of 2019 "ran a little hot", and offered a pseudo-apology. But GS's came back down after that summer to a nominal level. Then Covid Happened.

We all know the Covid recovery was considerably faster than they ever considered possible. They were way behind the power curve, and the only way to "capture revenue" was to jam the foot on the network accelerator. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense (considering where they found themselves). We are still on the wrong side of the power curve, and we have maxed out hiring at a level not considered possible before. That simply can not persist. We will eventually catch up on hiring, probably in the next 18 months. When that happens, how quickly they lift their foot off the accelerator will be the primary factor in our QOL and GS-palooza coming to an end. But it will happen. Eventually.

tcco94

I guess it depends on the outlook of what is a GS-palooza month. Certainly the levels from last few years will end, but what does it go back to. Even going back to 2014 levels is still a high amount of GS, but a heavy contraction from anything 2021-2023.

also replacing thousand of WB A’s for next handful of years is probably a bigger challenge because of the ripple affect in movement it creates every AE. Granted I imagine they are getting an idea of how to do this efficiently.

Scoop

It will be a challenge but not as hard as recovering from the VEOP. 2000 guys leaving all within a year greatly contributed to our staffing issues. 500/year should not be an issue if and when we ever catch up. The biggest unknown is probably how quickly the company wants to grow while we are still behind on staffing.

Once the company decides on the staffing level they will adroitly and expertly hire the exact number of Pilots to exactly match the exodus............................................ ................. said no one ever.

Scoop

PhilMcCrackin

Way too early to tell, but is there any chance that the 200 a month hiring continues throughout 2024? We all know initially they said 200/month until middle of 2023 then throttle back. Rumor has it that management wants to grow the list to 17000 pilots. TIA.

tennisguru

I would say it is unlikely to continue throughout all of 2024. Currently we are at ~15300. We'll lose about 500 for 2023, but hiring another 2000 or so pilots for the rest of the year gets us pretty close to that 17000 number. They may run some larger classes for a few months in 2024 but hiring another 1500-2000 next year seems like a stretch.

PhilMcCrackin

I would say a well staffed airline is better than an understaffed airline. For so many of my regional colleagues, I’ve heard that Delta has the least amount of retirements (which is true). However, more retirements means being understaffed (thinking of AA with almost 700 retirements a year) which translates to more training events for the company and more flying for a smaller pilot group.