I have been looking at the staffing and it appears that the most junior captain at UAL is around 50% total company seniority. It appears from this that the trend to upgrade as soon as possible is far greater at United than it was at CAL.

A lot of talk on here has been about how junior the captains were at CAL. This was primarily because our FO's tended to be extremely senior and avoided the captain bids for QOL. We see almost as many FO's retire off the 777 as Captains. In fact right now someone I know who is 32% in the company is holding #83 in Newark on the 777 (about 22%). He can easily hold Captain in any A320 base as a line holder using the current list.

The idea that all the UAL guys will flow into the Captain slots at CAL is probably very true. But, I think a lot of people are forgetting that a TON of our very senior people commute from the West Coast, Denver and even a bunch from MSP and ORD. These folks are very senior yet have chosen to not commute to a domestic line in ORD, LAX, SFO or DEN until post ISL as the small number of flights made the schedule's very poor.

Now that the ISL is done and the Airbus is open to bidding by both sides (as there are openings), I would expect some of our most senior guys (top 20%) to bid home to the West coast and Denver. We have had such poor bases for so long that the idea these guys can fly from home is very exciting. It will be interesting to see how many CAL guys flow on to the Bus.