If your job is gone or going, the next 30 days matter more than the next 6 months. Here's a structured map of where the aviation industry is still hiring - and how to be first to those roles before the rest of the displaced workforce arrives.
A US ultra-low-cost carrier collapsing isn't just one company's bad news. Spirit Airlines' workforce - pilots, flight attendants, A&P mechanics, dispatchers, ramp agents, gate agents, fleet service, network planners, finance, ops, IT - is now competing for the same regional pool of replacement roles. (Note: this piece is about where to go next from Spirit; Spirit Airlines itself is restructuring through Chapter 11 and is not on most rehire lists, and Spirit AeroSystems' workforce is similarly in M&A flux as Boeing/Airbus carve up the asset base — neither is a target employer.) The first wave of applications at the receiving carriers goes through in the first two weeks. Recruiters fill what they can quickly, then the volume of incoming résumés overwhelms their funnels and response rates collapse.
So the practical question isn't where will the industry be in six months?. It's which doors are open this week, and how do I be applicant #5 instead of applicant #500?
Job-search advice that says "look for airline jobs" is useless. The aviation labour market is highly segmented by certification and licence - your A&P doesn't translate to flight ops, your FAA dispatcher cert doesn't cross to crew scheduling, and your 737 type rating only matches certain operators. So the right move is to identify which segment of aviation employers wants the exact certification stack you have.
Other US ULCCs and growing LCCs - Frontier, Allegiant, Sun Country, Breeze, Avelo - are the first natural target if you held a Spirit Airbus type. Cargo carriers like Atlas Air and Amazon Air feeder operators are aggressive on widebody and narrowbody hiring and have been for two years. Regional carriers - Republic, SkyWest, Endeavor, Envoy, PSA, Piedmont - hire steadily but at lower pay than majors; useful for hours-building, less so for senior captains. Internationally, gulf carriers (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar) are running expansion programmes; Asian LCCs (AirAsia, IndiGo, Akasa, VietJet) hire on type rating and English fluency.
Same shortlist of US LCCs above, plus JetBlue, Hawaiian, Alaska, Delta, United, American - all of which have run continuous FA hiring for the past 18 months. Gulf and Asia-Pacific carriers (Emirates, Qatar, Singapore, ANA, Cathay) are aggressive on US-based bilingual crew. Cabin-crew pools also feed into corporate / private aviation operators (NetJets, Flexjet, VistaJet, Wheels Up) - smaller in volume, but materially better schedules and pay for the lucky few.
This segment is the strongest aviation labour market in the US right now. Major airlines run their own MRO bases (Delta TechOps, AA Tulsa, United TechOps); independent MROs (StandardAero, AAR, HAECO, ST Engineering MRA) hire continuously. Aerospace primes - Boeing, Airbus, RTX (Collins / Pratt & Whitney / Raytheon), Hexcel, Moog, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce - hire mechanics and technicians for assembly and rework, not just engineers. eVTOL / advanced air mobility programmes (Joby, Archer, Wisk, Heart Aerospace, Lilium) hire smaller numbers but are pay-aggressive on senior structures and powerplant techs. Note: Spirit AeroSystems is in distressed M&A (Boeing reabsorption / Airbus carve-out of European facilities) — not a stable hiring target right now; expect headcount churn rather than net adds.
FAA-licenced dispatchers are a relatively small population, and every airline has at least a handful. The same US LCC and regional list applies. Cargo (Atlas, Amazon Air, FedEx, UPS) hires dispatchers continuously. Some operations centres also hire crew schedulers / crew trackers without an FAA dispatcher cert - that lane is meaningfully less crowded than the cert-required lane.
Volume hiring is concentrated at the largest carriers and their regional partners. American Airlines Regional (PSA / Piedmont / Envoy), Delta Ground Services, Southwest, JetBlue. Ground-handling vendors (Swissport, Menzies, dnata, Unifi) hire across many stations and don't require carrier-loyalty. These are the most replaceable airline jobs - meaning they're the easiest to land, but also the lowest-paid.
If you're on the engineering side of aviation - aerospace, propulsion, structures, avionics, flight test - the primes (Airbus, Boeing, RTX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, GE Aerospace, Safran, Honeywell) have been on a continuous hiring cycle. Defence-adjacent firms (Anduril, Shield AI, Skydio, Palantir, Kratos) hire aviation- and aerospace-trained engineers aggressively. eVTOL programmes are smaller in headcount but pay above industry average for senior aerodynamics / control-systems work.
Network planning, revenue management, pricing, ops research, IT, finance, compliance - these airline back-office functions translate directly to other carriers and to non-airline employers in the same supply chain (booking systems, GDSs, MRO software, fleet leasing companies). Don't restrict yourself to airline employers if your skills are general.
Aviation roles cluster around recurrent training cycles and seasonal rosters. When a carrier opens a pilot or FA bid, recruiters typically interview through the first two to three "classes" of applicants and then close the requisition until the next training start. If you're in the first wave of post-Spirit applicants, you're competing against a small subset of the total displaced workforce. By week four, you're competing against most of it - plus the people who'd been quietly waiting for a better opportunity.
This dynamic is worse for type-rated pilots (because the next class might be three months away) and for licenced dispatchers (because the population is small enough that recruiters know each other's pipelines). It's slightly less acute for ground-handling roles - those companies are typically in continuous hire mode - but the senior-supervisor and station-manager openings still close fast.
Three things, in order of leverage:
Following the Spirit news, we've expanded our aviation industry coverage to direct-monitor the careers pages of the airlines and aerospace employers most relevant to displaced workers:
Plus everything that surfaces from public job boards (Reed UK, USAJobs, France Travail, Canada Job Bank, Singapore MyCareersFuture, Germany's Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Taiwan 104, SEEK Asia) - which between them carry tens of thousands of additional aviation roles globally, automatically classified into the new Aviation & Aerospace industry filter at signup. We're actively expanding the direct-ATS coverage list - if there's a specific carrier or MRO you want monitored, tell us.
The fundamentals haven't changed. Aviation roles still close in 24 to 72 hours when they're hot, recruiter response rates still drop sharply with each day a posting stays open, and the way to win is still to be first - not best, just first - in the funnel. The Spirit collapse changes the volume of competition, not the rules.