It takes over a thousand hours of flight time to even qualify as an airline pilot. It's not a labor pool you can just expand and contract on a whim. It's a work

It takes over a thousand hours of flight time to even qualify as an airline pilot. It's not a labor pool you can just expand and contract on a whim. It's a work force you have to strategically cultivate and maintain. When companies get too eager to "trim the fat" in lean times this is the result. You can't always scale back up as quickly as you'd like.