Flyjustin

They can't just put you on the street. They will have to come up with something to avoid lawsuits

Duksrule

Agreed. Plus now that you will have to have 1500 hours to get a seat in an airliner, I can see flight training dropping off. Back when you had a decent chance of being hired if you made it through your ratings and got to 500 hours people still wanted to start training. At 1500 hours though that carrot will be way to far away. When new students shrink so will the need for CFIs. Traffic watch is almost a thing of the past now. Banner towing is getting a bit harder to break into and most survey companies want 500-1000 hours to get into the door. The traditional low time jobs are drying up. Unless you have a bunch of rich kid that can go buy a 1000 hours it may end up being a shortage at some point.

Duksrule

The law says I can't let you fly so I have to lay you off until you are able to fly. Thanks for your understanding.

I don't see how anyone could sue an airline for a law that congress came up with. That is why everyone has raised their mins. Silver went from 250 hours to 1000 hours in a month.

Grumble

What are you going to sue them for? You don't meet the federal requirements.

Regionals won't have any problem staffing themsevles, they just need to up the pay. Of course that creates a whole host of other problems for them...

This should be interesting.

saab2000

Upping the pay is not going to make a bunch of ATP pilots appear out of thin air. I agree that the supply and demand model is likely to result in better contracts for us pilots at some point but ATP qualified people aren't just going to start showing up just because pay goes up.

Grumble

There will always be ATP holding candidates out there, the question is will they leave whatever job they're at to sling gear on an RJ?

1500 hours isn't an insurmountable obstacle. In the late 90's you couldnt get a phone call from ACA or ASA with less than 2K TT.

saab2000

Same at my company. But a lot of the jobs that people took to build those 2000 hours don't exist anymore. Check flying? Mostly a thing of the past. Freight? A lot of single-engine Caravan jobs with lifers because they're not bad jobs.

The irony of this situation is that there were times when majors were hiring people with wet commercial certificates and I am personally aware of two pilots who were hired at AA and Northwest Orient with private certificates back in the late '60s and early '70s. United used to do the same thing.

I agree though that things will get interesting. And I stand by what I said, the industry will not produce as many pilots as are going to be forced out by retirement starting in December. The numbers are huge and there is no way the training and certifying of ATPs is going to keep up with that number.

We'll see what happens!

sandrich

I don't know how reliable this is, but I heard the RAA just had a meeting and is pushing the date up to June 1st (not sure if that's industry wide or just certain airlines) Here at Silver, you will be laid off with no recall rights. There's already a few on the list because of age...

block30

Why would the RAA push the date up(earlier)?

Isn't Roger "mess with the bull, you get the horns" Cohen the President/Dictator of the RAA? Why would he make life on regionals mgt harder?

Bellanca

This is the biggest issue right here.

There are fewer time building jobs all around. The number of students has really dropped off in the last ten years, and continues to drop off. Also, the number of people looking to get only private/instrument has fallen off drastically with $6/gal 100LL. So now the instructing profession is like a ponzi scheme. For an instructor to get 1500 hours they are virtually going to have to take 10 other pilots from 0 hours through commercial. Then those 10 wet commercials need another 100 pilots to get themselves up to ATP mins... It is unsustainable. Not to mention, getting 500 hours of 50nm cross country is going to be quite a feat for most people doing most traditional time-building jobs.

Fortunately for me, I'll be close to ATP mins by the time the law goes into effect, but for any wet commericals/CFI's the low-time job market is going to become completely stagnant.

My only personal concern is about the new ATP training that was discussed in the NPRM. It appeared that the ATP cert was going to require quite a few hours of high level (expensive) sim time, and was going to be way more involved than just buying some hours in a light twin and taking a checkride (which is already pretty expensive). I'm not sure I'll be able to swing it on my CFI pay if I have to drop another $5,000-$10,000 +++ on my own flight training in order to go to the airlines.