How about instead of street captains, the company hires more prior 121 guys who have the 1000 or close to 1000 hours, and as the need arises for captains, go down the seniority list for qualified captains. If street captains were truly needed, then brand new to mesa prior 121 FOs would then be eligible for upgrade assuming they get 2 letters of Rec. Basically what Mesa is doing now. What if some crappy FO with 2k hours from another carrier, who shouldn't be a captain, applied for the street captain program and became a street captain at Mesa with no real screening process or time at Mesa on the line, carrying over another airlines way of doing things and questionable decision making, or at least unchecked. Instead, if mesa had a 3-6 month upgrade time, prior 121 guy comes over, goes thru initial with all other new hires, does IOE, gets some letters of Rec, then bids to upgrade. I think that would work out better for everyone, and I don't know of any FOs that would be upset with that. Speculation on my part is we don't have any carrots left to dangle other than rumors. Bad contract, no new flying announced, quick upgrade music stopped. And what better rumor than the ever present more flying and now possible street captains to get more people in the applicant pool.

With the high number of prior 121 guys hired over the spring of 14 (maybe earlier?) thru now, I seriously doubt we are lacking enough FOs with 1000 121 hours to fill the left seat. And in the next 6 months we will have hundreds of people hired in 2013 and 2014 who have 1000 hours at Mesa alone. I think filling the right seat will be the problem. And rumors of a shortage of left seaters is a good way to solve that.