‘Eating your young’: US airlines poach pilots from regional affiliates

The message from Mesa Airlines could not have been clearer if the US regional carrier had written “Help Wanted” across the sky. Last week the company announced it would pay a $110,000 signing bonus for captains who join, as well as offering an accelerated career path to higher-paying, more prestigious jobs at United Airlines. It was the latest sally in an industry battle for cockpit talent that is improving pilot wages but contributing to worse service for smaller communities. Regional carriers fly shorter routes to outlying cities with jets that contain fewer seats than those flown by carriers such as United, Delta Air Lines or American Airlines. The mainline airlines own some regional subsidiaries, while other companies such as publicly traded Mesa or SkyWest Airlines fly under contract with their larger partners. Regional airlines pay pilots the least, while mainline carriers top the industry’s remuneration ladder. The relationship between the two has become more complicated as mainline carriers poach from the regionals’ ranks to solve their own staffing shortages. “We clearly have gone through a rough patch,” Mesa CE Jonathan Ornstein told investors last week. “We are very focused on pilot production.” Regional carriers lose about 20 per cent of their pilots in a normal year to mainline carriers, but last year it was more than two-thirds. A shortage of pilots has contributed to cuts to air service in smaller cities, with 161 airports losing more than one in four commercial flights between 2019 and 2022, according to the Regional Airline Association. Fewer pilots also may increase pressure at budget carriers such as Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines to pay their own aviators more and preserve their profit margins by raising fares. United chief executive Scott Kirby said last month that the pilot shortage is driving up low-cost airlines’ labour expenses, closer to those of a traditional mainline carrier. “The era of $4 prices from Los Angeles to Cabo [San Lucas, Mexico] and $7 from New York to Florida or $9 from Houston to Central America are probably a thing of the past,” he said. “It’s up to other airlines to decide how to price the product. But I’m pretty sure it’s not up to them what’s happening to their cost structure.” The supply of pilots has tightened over the past two decades, but it never reached a crisis because demand for air travel, and consequently demand for pilots, dropped after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, said aviation consultant Kit Darby. <br/>