Originally Posted by
Toddnel
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.
There will definitely be some movement based on folks finally not having to commute. Also some based on the pain of commuting to a specific base. On the UA side people would commute to ORD rather than IAD because in IAD (except for the 777) you have to cover trips out of IAD, DCA, and BWI. So, I think IAH will fit better for commuters than IAD. EWR would prob be better as well, based on the very high concentration of trips out of EWR, but the LGA and JFK trips will still scare off some commuters.
The West Coast bidding is going to be quite interesting in the coming years ( I can say interesting since I am an ORD guy, I am sure the West Coast guys would choose a different word) Opening a West Coast 787, likely closing LAX 747 and shrinking SFO 747, growing the SFO 777 base, Majorly expanding the SFO 737 base, expanding the LAX 737 base, all with the backdrop of 80+ retirements this year and 320 next year.
Just for your info. Here is the current number of active folks in each seat around the UA side of the operation. Figure with this and the junior man info from a few days ago, people should be able to start getting an idea of where they are. The info only includes active people, so no instructors, management, SL, or LOA types.
Equip Pos ORD LAX SFO
400 CAP 14 - 18 - 145
400 F/O 38 - 47 - 307
Equip Pos DCA ORD LAX SFO SEA
777 CAP 161 - 94 - 42 - 78 - 16
777 F/O 308 - 246- 82 - 113- 22
Equip Pos--- JFK DCA ORD IAH DEN LAX SFO SEA
757/67 CAP 69- 149 177 39 - 119 106- 87- 22
757/67 F/O 106 185 218 88 - 112 97 - 92- 21
Equip Pos---- JFK DCA ORD IAH DEN LAX SFO
319/320 CAP 46- 159- 230 48 237 109 116
319/320 F/O 40- 168- 244 54 253 117 121
The dashes don't mean anything they are just there to make the columns line up