Originally Posted by
LCAL dude
Seriously? If someone's a 73 Captain at lCal, they're only a few hundred numbers from being a 756 Captain, and could reasonably expect to hold 756 Captain within 2 years. So your question should be:
"The career expectations (career earnings) of a currently unemployed pilot who will return as a junior FO for awhile and eventually become a wide body captain for one year starting at 64, vs a 35 year old lCal pilot who is currently a narrow body captain and will become a 756 Captain by 40 will be massively different."
Which is all nonsense. You make it sound like all the pilots at CAL are 757 captains. Half are Capts and half are FOs. Just because of big undesirable domiciles like EWR causing guys to stay in the right seat forever and allowing capt to go junior isn't going to be considered. All of my friends at CAL were hired in the late 90s. Guess what? They are all FOs still. They like being senior on the 767 and 777 as FOs. They all tell me they can hold 757 cap but the flying is lousy so they don't upgrade. Same with 737 capt. They all commute and don't want to commute to a lousy narrow body schedule.
If your SLI argument is that your list has more bidding variability and that you should be rewarded, it isn't going to work.
I guess for some pilots at CAL it is a career expectation to have 15 years seniority and be a 767 FO.
So please don't try and convince me or anyone that because a guy with 80% seniority can hold 737 capt that every pilot above that has that expectation, because if they actually bid it, it wouldn't go below 50%.
That's why they didn't look at who sat where when they did DAL NWA. Just what each airline brought in terms of equipment.
What you should do is get all the CAL pilots to intentionally not bid 777 Cap and let it go to the bottom guy on the list, so you can argue that every CAL pilot can hold 777 Cap their entire career.
Really looking forward to the final SLI outcome so we can put this to rest.