What is the current state of Commercial aviation?

Morgan3820

Morgan3820

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El Conquistador
I have heard somewhere that 50% of airline pilots are back flying.
 
my cfi is now a captain for SkyWest and tells me that, AFAHK, SW has not laid off any pilots. he has been flying all thru the pandemic.
 
At this moment, there are 844 Airbus A320s, 787 Boeing 737-800s, 315 Airbus A321s flying, according to FlightAware. 198 Skyhawks as well. Earlier today there were 1000 Skyhawks.
 
At my airline, there’s still about 1700 pilots that don’t have a plane. 90 mainline planes are still parked along with 39 regional planes. Hopefully the vaccine will speed up the recovery. I think we have like 12700ish pilots so the majority of them are flying. There’s a couple thousand on various leaves (personal, sick, military, etc).
 
After the latest round of PPE for the airlines is done my wife and 12k flight attendants ( A little over 50%) will be involuntary furloughed at her airline and that happens 1 March. You have to have 21 plus years seniority with the company to keep your job...pilots are different but on the FA side it’s tough...part of it is the Union is not budging as seniority is all they care about and saving jobs and side agreements are not being considered where they were prior to now. Prior to this many like my wife have volunteered not to work for almost a year to save payroll...
 
AAL taking about furloughs for another 13K employees. So, still not all that rosy.

Sent from my SM-N976U using Tapatalk
 
Domestic routes better, international not quite so good.
My kid brother flies B787 longhauls. Still not up to 50% of the flights he was doing pre-COVID.
 
eman1200 said:
Turns out the pilot community is smarter than I thought.
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The Commercial aviation pilots are; unlike us they figured out how to fly without having to pay to buy the airplane. Or the fuel. ;)
 
SoonerAviator said:
AAL taking about furloughs for another 13K employees. So, still not all that rosy.
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It's terrible, but fortunately not another 13K. All the furloughs from October 1st were called back after the second stimulus package was sent through last month. So this is a subset of that original group getting WARN letters for April 1st. Of the 13K, 1850 are pilots.
 
My airline recalled everyone due to government requirements for cares act. Only about 15% of the recalled pilots actually working. The remainder are still waiting. So far no warn letters have gone out for another furlough but I am expecting one any day.
 
The corporate side of aviation is doing a little better, at least in my area. I only know of two crews that were laid off, and both of them are back working for the same owners now. I have a buddy that got hired at Delta, left his job at JetBlue, and Delta sent him home from his new hire class. I'm not sure if he was there long enough to get a employee number, but either way he's at home twiddling his thumbs. Thankfully his wife has a really good job.
 
I know folks on furlough that have received recall notifications.
 
Two (3? Could have lost a regional too) of our customers folded. About a third of the fleet my company supports (1000’s) is either parked or scrapped, domestic and international. Pax counts down more than that. I’ve heard bizjets are about even YoY.
 
part 135 and 91 turbine doing pretty good. Rich people gotta stay rich. Airline not so good.
 
Livin' the dream. It goes like this............First day of basic indoc. The tell you how lucky you are. "You just won the lotery and your going to be a rock star" And your going to upgrade before you know it. We are expanding fast, and we have lots of new planes on order, your future is secure, and amazing. OH, By the way, HERE iS YOUR FURLOUGH NOTICE!" We may see you in 5 yrs or so. Of course 5 yrs from now, you will need to compete for your job again, we won't preserve your seniority number.
All other jobs are not available to you, since you may quit at any time to return to your airline job! So no need to apply, for ANYTHING resembling a job. It's great, all that glory certainly filled my bank account.
 
Oldmanb777 said:
Livin' the dream. It goes like this............First day of basic indoc. The tell you how lucky you are. "You just won the lotery and your going to be a rock star" And your going to upgrade before you know it. We are expanding fast, and we have lots of new planes on order, your future is secure, and amazing. OH, By the way, HERE iS YOUR FURLOUGH NOTICE!" We may see you in 5 yrs or so. Of course 5 yrs from now, you will need to compete for your job again, we won't preserve your seniority number.
All other jobs are not available to you, since you may quit at any time to return to your airline job! So no need to apply, for ANYTHING resembling a job. It's great, all that glory certainly filled my bank account.
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At the end of the day the question is, knowing what you know now, if you were back at the vocational start line again, would you do anything different?
 
My buddy at Delta needs a new type rating before he can fly again. He was on the mad dogs. He's still waiting.
 
A friend flies for AAL. He has been on furlough for 6 months. Went down a month ago and got training for the Max to stay current. He just left for a 4 week rotation. Said he will be on a 2 week on 2 week off rotation this summer
 
We’ve been lucky. Hiring as fast as we can. Hope you passenger guys all get back to full speed quickly.
 
Busflyer said:
We’ve been lucky. Hiring as fast as we can. Hope you passenger guys all get back to full speed quickly.
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Whadya got for a 700+ hour comm pilot with 7 hours multi? That’s right, 7, I just don’t like to flaunt it.

I’ve been waiting for a call from Epps but they must have misplaced my number.
 
GREAT question, asked at the wrong time. Really a great question. I, and many of my classmates have discussed this at length, with no clear answer. I doubt I would do anything different. That said, I MADE A LOT of mistakes along the way. Again, I doubt I would do anything different, because I seem to make lots of mistakes. If I knew what i was doing, I would have chosen (As if you could) the proper airline. That would make a real difference. But the airline I wound up with and was really devoted to was run through the ringer. I made something of myself, out side the airline business. If I had depended on the airline business, i would be in a very different position now. But i worked another job concurrently with flying, so I'm ok. My brother didn't. He tried to live the "airline pilot lifestyle" and so had to get another job after he retired. His age, being a few years older, also had him retiring under a bankruptcy contract. I retired during good times. So that was totally luck. He had good times at a good airline for many years, while i was struggling at a marginal airline. I didnt; have the exepectations of a great carreer that he had. So we did things very different . I now can look back and say, maybe it was a blessing that I worked for a marginal airline, instead of the dream job. It made me self sufficient, instead of relying on the airline. It's interesting, and a really great question. Wish I had a better answer. I was told many years ago, "Live like an airline pilot, and you will be in trouble all your life. Live like a minimum wage worker all your carreer and you'll be fine". Looking back, that was great advice. Goes for many occupations, but especially for airline workers. You don't make the sacrifices in life to be a career pilot without it being a calling. This could go on all night. But again a GREAT question that I wish I could answer.
 
eman1200 said:
Whadya got for a 700+ hour comm pilot with 7 hours multi? That’s right, 7, I just don’t like to flaunt it.

I’ve been waiting for a call from Epps but they must have misplaced my number.
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I had just a couple more hundred total time and 11 hours of multi when I got hired. The bar was set low:D
 
eman1200 said:
Whadya got for a 700+ hour comm pilot with 7 hours multi? That’s right, 7, I just don’t like to flaunt it.

I’ve been waiting for a call from Epps but they must have misplaced my number.
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I assume you're in the ATL area, have you applied at Planesense? They have a PDK base.
 
I have a friend that I worked with in the 70's. He got out. He started his own business. He had a much better home life. Did a lot of enjoyable things with his family and generally had much better times than i had. He enjoyed lots of stability. I didn't. He was there for his family, I wasn't. He didn't get to see the sunset and sunrise over ABERI. (The north pole) he has never seen the noctilucent clouds from 30W. So yes I would do it all again, I was incredibly lucky in my career, but not as lucky as some others. If you had asked me after the 4th redeye in a row over the Atlantic and a CATII into Milan and a slam dunk into there, and the hotel maids constantly waking me up to clean my room all day while I was trying to sleep. Or after that night, getting to my hotel room and finding that the maid hadn't changed the sheets on my bed. Only "freshened them up". The last Capt to occupy my room had a bit of a leak, it was that time of the month. I'm sure it was ok, since we are good friends and class mates. (We hot bunked a lot) My answer would be very different.
 
eman1200 said:
Whadya got for a 700+ hour comm pilot with 7 hours multi? That’s right, 7, I just don’t like to flaunt it.

I’ve been waiting for a call from Epps but they must have misplaced my number.
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Well.... you might need a few more multi hours. Sorry
 
eman1200 said:
Nah I wouldn’t dare live in hotlanta, I was just busting my future boss’s balls.
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International is taking a dive due to the new requirement implemented in January that you need a clean covid test before being allowed on a plane coming back to the US. It pretty much killed any sort of bump they were getting from people traveling for pleasure and businesses are not willing to risk getting employees stuck in a foreign country for two weeks with nowhere to stay because of a false positive. There is talk about implementing those same rules for domestic flights. If that happens the airline industry is going to be in for some really rough times.
 
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