"This company will not be training any more pilots in the foreseeable future, since we have 400 trained pilots on our...

Christy-Earls September 21, 2018

I'm curious as well. And could you point out the conclusion in this passage?

Mehran September 22, 2018

@Bhumi @Christy-Earls let's break it down!

The conclusion here is, "there will be no shortage of personnel despite the current upswing in the aviation industry."

What is the support provided? This company and the other five major companies each have roughly 400 trained pilots on their waiting lists but the projected requirement for each company is for not many more than 100 additional pilots.

So this implies that there are six companies with a projected requirement of ~100 additional pilots each, which means we would need approximately ~600 total additional pilots to avoid a shortage of personnel. With 400 trained pilots on the waiting lists of all six companies, however, this argument seems to make sense (400 x 6 = 2400 trained pilots).

So how does (A) weaken?

(A) states, "Most of the trained pilots who are on a waiting list for a job are on the waiting lists of all the major companies."

This weakens the argument by pointing out that there is substantial overlap in these waiting lists, which implies that the total number of trained pilots is much closer to 400, which obviously presents a problem if the projected requirement for all six companies is ~600.

Hope that helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions.