Agreed. Context: “spending another 25-100 million $$ per year for the next decade trying a dozen different ways to produce our way out of the problem.”
I’m all for innovation, QOL improvements, and attacking this thing from multiple angles. It’s spending wads of money to try to widen the mouth of the pipeline when a fraction of that could double the bonus and stop the bleeding instantly that makes me hurt for the guys and gals on the line doing more and more with less and less. How much longer can we sustain take rates well below the 65% that we require to maintain a healthy force, when we’re way beyond unhealthy? I bet if we retained more seasoned pilots we could increase production at a fraction of the cost of some of these other experiments. I’m not disparaging PTN or UPT 2.5 or whatever... I’m talking about stuff like contract UPT, new UPT bases, diversity outreach etc. Stuff that might be good, but is not the solution we need right this minute and is costing $$$10s of millions of dollars. We have not yet gone to Congress begging and pleading. They must think things are pretty darn good now that we’ve leveled off.
The big lie is that we can’t compete on compensation. No, not that improvements should not be happening with or without a crisis, but QOL is where we will never compete.